March is a month that is deceptively busy. In the middle of it is Spring Break, where my youth students and young adult groups have breaks and so, it seems I get a week off. At this time, every year without fail, I prop my feet up thinking I’ll have a nice, easy month. I can hear it now. Get out your Spotify or something, experience this with me. Play the song “Concerning Hobbits” off the Lord of the Rings Soundtrack. As you listen, imagine this. You’re in a backyard, the breeze graciously lapping against your cheeks. You sit in a comfy rocking chair with some sort of nice beverage or snack. It’s right on the cusp of spring, so it’s a temperate 65-70 degrees. You have your favorite sweater and, the piece that ties the picture together, a new book ready to crack open. Life is sublime in The Shire. I’m ready to rest, read, slightly tan under the spring sun, and look out upon a job well done and a life that is beginning to turn out alright.
Snap back to reality. It’s two months until summer. Summer means camps, mission trips, classes to teach, sermons to give, events to throw, things to plan, stuff to buy, and, somewhere in between there, I also must pursue my personal dreams and goals. That’s March. There’s a peek into Eden, where all that glitters is gold, and then a harsh reminder that you’re still here in depravity, tired and busy.
However, I managed to read a couple of books this month. A lot of this month was finishing up Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Donald Capp’s Jesus: A Psychological Biography, the two books from last reading list that were both quite a hefty tome. Also, if you read last month’s addition, you know that I’ve been quite the busy bee. But I still got my stinger in tact, ready to strike. And as long as there is honey to be made and plants to be pollenated, I’m still buzzing about.
Not sure what that bee analogy means but, I read a couple of books in March. Here they are:
The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas by Who The Heck Knows
Reading something more academic like Capps’ psychobiography of Christ got me in a certain academic mood. I don’t really know how to explain it other than whenever I read smart people, I’d like to pretend like I can add to the conversation. There were some things about that book that were really insightful, other things that I thought were farfetched to the point of outright heresy. At any rate, I felt I needed a refresher on some of the documents this book was citing.
With any psychobiography, the obvious methodological route is to observe childhood experiences to explain adult behaviors. But Capps was attempting to psychoanalyze Jesus Christ, who has no real stories of childhood besides a few here and there to pull from. Unless you pull from the apocrypha. Apocryphal texts are texts that are about the same events as the Bible but have questionable authority and content, and are therefore not considered canonical. There are a plethora of apocryphal texts, including other gospels, secret revelations supposedly written by disciples and apostles, even specific “acts” of apostles preaching the gospel after the events of the New Testament. Some of these give us insight into the history and world of the time around the New Testament. Which, objectively, rules. Some are downright, boneified forgeries. Among these forgeries are the Infancy Gospels.
The Infancy Gospels are supposed accounts of the child Christ and Mary, Mother of God. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas details some childhood stories of Jesus while the Infancy Gospel of James (aka the Protoevangelion…which is a way cooler name) focused on the life of the child Mary up until the events of Luke 2. These texts are so ubiquitously unapproved by scholars that Capps in his psychobiography didn’t even consider them all that much. Which made me wonder, “what was in those crazy texts again?”. So I ran over to a beautiful library of New Testament scholarship and apocrypha, resplendent with other sources, scholarly insights and discussions, textual criticism, and reference material. I didn’t have to run far. It’s online and totally for free at earlychristianwritings.com. Peter Kirby, the founder, doesn’t know me, endorse me, or even subscribe to my Substack (the nerve!). I just love his website and I use it all the time. You should too (if you’re into these kinds of things).
I want to start first with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. This thing is insane. It is chockful of wild, anachronistic stories that seem to have no real point to them other than promoting the idea that Jesus had all the power of God but none of God nature. There is one story in here of the young Jesus getting bumped into by another child and Jesus just straight up killed him. In one of my favorite stories, Jesus was gathering up some water. Annas the Scribe’s son comes and with a stick, again, messes with Jesus and knocks all the water out of Jesus’ collection. Because of this, instead of “forgive them for they know not what they do” or something indicative of Christ’s canonical nature, Jesus put a curse on him, saying, “thou shalt be dried up like a tree, and thou shalt not bring forth either leaves, or root, or fruit”. And then the kid…“dried up”? What does that mean? Like he dried up like raisin? I really have no idea how to interpret that. From there, Jesus is admonished by Joseph (his dad…remember?) and is sent to a bunch of different teachers until Jesus learns to use his powers for good. It’s almost like Christ is Eleven from Stranger Things. The main question to ask here is, “why would someone write this?”. It’s obvious it isn’t from Thomas the Israelite, who it claims to be from. It’s clear that this depiction of Jesus doesn’t meet really any orthodox position from the earliest church fathers and looks either like adoptionism or Gnosticism. So the question remains, why? No scholar can really come to a consensus. Like most things in the academy, we have theories. Maybe it’s a polemic against another group that holds a different Christology. Maybe it’s an attempt to justify a certain claim that the writer or writers had to justify. Maybe it’s someone just having a laugh and trying to confuse us all. Who knows. I just know that someone attempted to achieve something on their own because they felt there was not enough truth in the canonical texts.
The Infancy Gospel of James chronicles the life of infant and child Mary, including the controversial marriage to Joseph, visitation by the Holy Spirit, and during her pregnancy with Christ. It fills in a lot of the gaps that Luke didn’t contain. It includes a rather miraculous birth of Mary, claiming her mother was barren and then, on the faith of her prayers, was able to conceive. It includes why Mary got married to Joseph and the inner turmoil he had during the entire ordeal. Joseph was conscious of Mary’s age, and appears to know that marrying her would be detrimental to his status. But, because of God’s call and some other forcible circumstances, he married her. It contains more detail on Joseph’s inner dialogue whenever he finds out she is pregnant despite never consummating their marriage. It’s more sympathetic of Joseph, and gives quite a personality to little mother Mary. Also it claims to have been written by James, brother of Christ! What an author to choose if you really want to convince someone that what' you’re saying is authoritative. Again, the question on every scholar’s mind is, why? Maybe this person or this group, in order to make Christianity more appealing or legitimate, attempted to revise the gospel to include these pieces of history. Maybe it was some other culture where marrying young girls like that wasn’t standard and had to come up with something to justify it. Maybe, again, the regular gospels just weren’t convincing enough, and they felt they had to legitimize themselves and their new faith to the world.
I’m not an expert on these texts, I’m not going to pretend to know how to interpret this or how to make sense of these preposterous “infancy gospels”. I do know that early Christianity was desperate to be a legitimate faith. Everyone wanted a piece of apostolic succession, connection with the canonical texts, and to think clearly about the earth shattering events that just happened. The Word was given to us, yet the world did not know it. God was right in front of us and we decided to put a mirror in front of him, just so we could see ourselves in his light.
Men Without Women: Stories by Haruki Murakami
I miss Japan. I was there around this time a year ago and, pretty soon after I got back, I began this here Substack. Some things in Japan just stay with you. For me, it was a lot of things, including their stories. I bought the Japanese classic The Tale of Genji whenever I was there and read through it whenever I got home. It was a mixture of subtle story telling, human emotion, and just a dash the the very fantastic. I wanted more Japanese story-telling, but for the modern person. I was also getting interested in thinking and possibly writing about male loneliness. Don’t ask why, I just was okay…alright I was a lonely boy that wanted stories about me and others like me. Single guys. Men without women. Haruki Murakami instantly came to mind. He’s the staple of modern Japanese literature and I knew he would have some sort of heart wrenching tale that would provide me the catharsis and validation I needed. So I bought it, knowing there were others like me.
Fast forward to when I actually read it. I’m in a relationship and not writing about male loneliness (at least that you know of…). It’s here, for some reason, that I decided to pick it up and read through the six fictional short stories surrounding six men, all without women.
Except that’s not what it was at all! In fact all of these guys had women in their lives. Some guys had a lot of women in their lives. I believe this collection of short stories is more about the all too known human experience of true loneliness. I believe the difference lies in what I dramatically call, the knowing. These are stories of men who know women, but do not know them enough to love them and do not love them enough to know them. The women, in return, do not love them back. Loneliness isn’t the absence of someone’s presence, it is the absence of sacrifice, which is love at its most basic and divine definition. Love is true knowledge. To love someone is to know someone, and vice versa. There’s a reason why the word know in Hebrew (yadha or yada) is used in the Old Testament as a euphemism for sex. It is one of the deepest, universal, objectively real necessities for human fulfilment. There is nothing worse than being unknown. That, I believe, is at the heart of Murakami’s stories in Men Without Women.
If you are a man, especially one that is struggling with loneliness, I think this book may have a character that conveys exactly how you feel. There are divorced bartenders, widowers, young men in love but not able to show or say it, womanizers who sleep around, and men who live what Henry David Thoreau calls, “lives of quiet desperation”. I see no shame in struggling. I believe there is shame in the narcissistic thought that you can handle it on your own. That leads to lives of quiet desperation. That leads to lives where every breath seems like a vaporous desire to reach out for a helping hand. We see it everywhere, and are all too familiar with its weight, this desperation. This desperation causes men to waste most of their lives on the recliner, drinking beers and watching football and not uttering a word to anyone. This desperation is the reason why single motherhood is an epidemic, and always has been. This desperation is the reason why in 2021, 80% of suicides were men.
I have been thinking recently a lot about the male condition; about the challenges facing modern man. Japan, where all these stories in Men Without Women take place, are seeing the cultural ramifications of men living quietly desperate lives. They are one of the only countries experiencing a steady decline in population. Men aren’t becoming fathers. Even more so, marriage rates are dropping at an alarming rate. To the point where one article said that, “things must change in order to save Japan”. Men aren’t becoming husbands. According to one study by Frontiers Psychology discovered 97% of young Japanese men view pornography on a daily basis. Furthermore, the same study suggested that those men that have “impaired control” towards their pornography usage display high levels of depression and anxiety. Japanese work culture is killing people. They even have a word for it: karoshi, or “death by overworking”. The vast majority that succumb to karoshi are men. The burden of Japanese men is a warning bell for the men of America, and perhaps the world, on the dangers of male loneliness (that is, true loneliness). Dare I say, men without women, namely love for a woman and love from a woman, are slowly burying themselves under the weight of human unfulfillment. All men want to sacrifice themselves for some greater good. Men without women often don’t have that good to sacrifice themselves for, the exceptions being those that sacrifice for their community and, most importantly, Almighty God. That’s the case for the Japanese, but what about us here, in the West? Maybe I’ll have to provide some more thoughts on that later. In the meantime, please read these stories in Murakami’s Men Without Women and call a man in your life to let them know that they are not alone.
“Just thinking about her made him warm inside. No longer did he wish to be a fish or a sunflower—or anything else, for that matter. For sure, it was a great inconvenience to have to walk on two legs and wear clothes and eat with a knife and fork. There were so many things he didn’t know. Yet had he been a fish or a sunflower, and not a human being, he might never have experienced this emotion.”-pt. 211
Back to Virtue: Traditional Moral Wisdom for Modern Moral Confusion by Peter Kreeft
I am a part of a secret society. We wear cloaks, meet at an ever-changing, concealed location, we chant, and maybe we talk to God. We discuss the vaporous matters of this world, the next world, the world below us, the world above us, and then the world right under our noses. We are esoteric knights in service of the truth that has been revealed to us in the God-man. It is there that we foment plans for insurrection by means of resurrection; revolution by means of restitution. We are but three, and no other soul shall enter our inner sanctum. In that society, we ponder the machinations of the physical and spiritual realms, slaying dragons and laying waste to any orc who dare come between us and our destiny.
It’s a book club. Me and two of my homies read books together. I know all that up there sounds dramatic but I sincerely believe if more people got together and read some books with one another, the world could begin to turn the other direction. We practice the age old discipline of iron sharpening. Isn’t it wonderful how two dull blades, when in sparking conversation, can make a sharp one? That’s what we do. We’ve read everything from C.S. Lewis to N.T. Wright, Kierkegaard to Chesterton and talked about nearly every topic under the sun. It’s a fantastic time, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
We’ve read philosopher, professor, and Catholic theologian Peter Kreeft before. His book Jesus Shock wrecked our worlds. For a book barely pushing 150 pages, it made us reconsider nearly everything we knew about who Jesus was and how we are to live according to his holy precepts. We knew that we’d like to continue reading some of his work, so we decided in March to read through his book Back to Virtue.
Back to Virtue was written in the late 80s, but is a book of nearly prophetic status regarding our modern cultural confusion towards morality and ethics. It suggests a return to traditional morality and virtue based on the practical and spiritual wisdom of the Bible. Kreeft is a philosopher at heart, so he brings in many characters and concepts from the Western Canon like Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and others into his writing. He’s also devoutly Catholic. The mix of these two, to the Protestant, seems rather contradictive. In reality, they have always been, and will always be, two sides of the same coin. It’s what makes me really admire Catholicism. No matter what you can say about them, they know their stuff, and have been thinking, writing, learning, and passing it down for millennia.
The first part of the book relays the current situation (at least HIS current situation in the 80s). It’s summed up, I believe, in one quote: “I feel has replaced I believe”. Within that one phrase sums up the recent turn of moral philosophy and ethical thinking. We base the good off personal anecdotal evidence and experience rather any principle or foundational ethic. We no longer have an “ethic” by which we follow in order to achieve a virtue, like how people have been doing for quite some time. Instead, we’ve replaced it with whatever makes us feel “good”. That, according to Kreeft, is a recipe for disaster. I believe he was right, given where we ended up nearly 40 years after that book was written. The degradation of virtue and a strong moral foundation led the Western world to develop weapons of mass destruction, the prominent problem of his day and, as suggested by the introduction, was one of his reasons for writing the book. Although our problems have shifted context, it never shifted character. The purpose of this book wasn’t just for a time and a place, but a decree for all times and all places to return to the knowledge of the ancients, the glory from whence they came.
So everything is bad and everyone sucks. But what is the solution? How do we recover from the abyss we are staring into? Kreeft claims three basic sets of virtues make up the Christian worldview : cardinal virtues, theological virtues, and the Beatitudes. A virtue is some sort of end to an ethic, a characteristic deemed universally good. Virtues must be based in some sort of ethic and then reciprocated through some sort of action. A visual that helps in Back to Virtue is the image of a tunnel. One on side of the tunnel is God, who pours into man’s spirit his grace, by faith. It goes through the tunnel (which is the soul) and then exits the other side, which is the body and produces good works. Your virtues exist in the tunnel, and they are evidence of God above you and the reasons by which you serve man outside of you. Cardinal virtues (cardinal meaning fundamental), include such things as courage, justice, wisdom, and moderation. Theological virtues, virtues that are based in God and are inherently “spiritual” (if that word hasn’t lost any meaning yet), are simply laid out at the end of 1 Corinthians 13: faith, hope, and love.
Kreeft takes some time to go over those virtues, but then spends the majority of the book on the Beatitudes. This is where, I believe, the book soars into a profoundly beautiful realm of honesty, theological battle, and wisdom. He takes the seven deadly sins (Pride, Greed, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Lust, and Gluttony) and confronts them with the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes have always been my favorite collection of scriptures, for no other reason than I like to read them, say them out loud, and personal encouragement. But this book gave an exegetical model to the beauty I’ve always known. Practicing the beatitudes confronts the sins that underlie every evil thing man is capable of. We always think of sin as an action or something we do. That undermines its evil, and therefore its seriousness. Sin is a condition that we must be in perpetual conflict with. There is no internal decision that can rid us of that, it must be acted upon through virtue, for Christ. The Beatitudes are not only encouraging words for the down trodden. They are sword, shield, axe, and spear. The very weapons with which we slay dragons and armor which protects us from the flaming arrows of inequity.
If I had one book that I’ve read this month that I would recommend, it would be this one. It is a handbook of defensive maneuvers against the dark arts (Harry Potter reference. Switching it up). It is both cultural critique and prophetic utterance as well as a call to arms for the sake of all that is good, beautiful, and right in our world.
“…the most crucial fact of all is forgotten: God is still here. The world God created cannot be secularized, only man’s consciousness can. God does not die, he is only eclipsed. As Saint Thomas More said, ‘the times are never so bad but that a good man can live in them.’ No, we do not have a right to our depression, because God is here, the God who spoke the Big Bang and the burning bush and the Resurrection; the God who is still ‘with you always, even to the end of the age’”. pg. 159
I have been thinking and writing down notes all the time regarding my “Treatise on Whimsy”. I’m not sure I’ve been as passionate writing and thinking about something as I have been about this little treatise. It is my personal homage to Lewis, Chesterton, Kreeft, and the other brilliant minds that I’ve been picking apart over the last few months. I also happen to think it is crucially important. In that regards, and for the sake of my own sanity, I have to make it perfect. Which is why it is taking me a while.
But underneath the firmament of my busyness, is this little publication. The best advice on writing I’ve ever read is to never write for an audience. I write for me. I write because I want to. I write because I have to. I read because I have to. I let the art be blood and honey, oozing from your veins, because everyone loves to look at a crime scene. I’m the rebellious bee that makes honey for those beside me and not the tyrannical queen, fattened by the work of its subjects. The queen bee that everyone seems to be after is a facade for death itself. Every bee wants to be with the queen, to have its progeny filled with royal blood: successful, wealthy, regal, and opulent. I want my legacy to be in the blooms and bellies of the world outside the hive. Pollinating, sweetening, buzzing, stinger still safe, and making the air around us breathable.
Again, no clue what that analogy means, but I like it.