Remember

Mori would not be a terrible name for a dog. It’s short, it’s kind of cute, so long as you are able to get past the inevitable “No, not like [Maury] Povich.” It’s not the name of our dog, we got a puppy this past Sunday. I didn’t have naming rights—it’s especially Abby’s dog. She’s wanted, and probably needed, a pet for a while. We were reluctant for a little bit. A cat would have been easier, and a natural fit as well, but that Abby and I are both allergic. This doesn’t stop her from using my parents’ Maine Coons as pillows (well, the mellow one, at least).

So Abby named her Galaxy. I seem to remember this being the name of a dog in one of the books we read this past year, but I can’t for the life of me place which book it was. Timmy was relatively uninterested at the prospect of getting a dog. A few weeks before the day came, we asked him if he was excited to get a puppy. He said, in his rather matter-of-fact tone, “Yeah, kinda. But when I grow up I’m getting a cat.” Whether this is because he really wanted a cat or it’s his plan to keep me or Abby away I’m not entirely sure.

I was a hold out on getting a dog for a while. Certainly before we established that both Abby and I were allergic to cats. I had been willing to consider getting shots or whatever, but Jamie wouldn’t allow it. I had a dog when I was a kid, not as young as Abby or Timmy. We actually had two dogs before him, both short stays at our house. First was Gracie, and then Murphy; both cocker spaniels or some other kind of spaniel mix. One of them was deaf, the other I vaguely remember as just being dumb. One may or may not have gone to live on a farm after. But for my tenth birthday we went to the Lynchburg city pound and I picked out a dog.

Charlie (short for Charlie Brown) was, okay, also probably not terribly bright, but he was a good dog. He matched my own demeanor, and he was always there. When I went off to college and then moved out to Virginia he stayed with my folks, and helped to keep the cat company. He lived until I was 26, so he was somewhere north of 16 when his time finally came. I remember going with him and my dad to the vet, but I couldn’t be there for the very end. It hurt a lot and that, more than the work it took to keep and train and love a dog, was what made me hesitant. I knew getting a dog would mean the good times, but also the last time.

Not long after we got her, Abby asked some questions about Charlie. Was he a good dog? What was he like? How old was he? She wanted to know why dogs lived so much shorter lives than people. Only answer I had was that that was how God made it. He could have made it otherwise, I suppose. Tortoises and parrots live such long lives, and they are considerably less worthy as pets. But I do think that their short time is intentional. We remember these attachments we have here won’t last forever, and their mortality point us to our own. Memento mori, carpe diem, and give boops.

Lord Have Mercy

A few months ago, our church sang the song "Lord Have Mercy (For What We Have Done)" by Matt Papa and Matt Boswell. It's a very pretty song (and I'm a sucker for a good kyrie), and I was thinking over it that night and realized I wanted a little more to it. It wasn't so much that anything needed fixing, but in my mind it felt just a little bit incomplete, so that night I sketched out a rough draft for an additional verse. A couple of weeks later I mentioned it to our pastor who oversees worship (another Matt, because you can never have too many) and after a couple of weeks back and forth he helped me to get it to a spot that I am really quite happy with, so up front I'd like to thank Matt Pottenger for his help and feedback.

Before I get to the additional verse, I wanted to do a brief survey of the song as it was to provide a sort of justification for why I wanted the third verse. The song itself can be found on YouTube (or most of the streaming services).

Verse 1

“For what we have done and left undone
We fall on Your countless mercies
For sins that are known and those unknown
We call on Your name so holy

For envy and pride, for closing our eyes
For scorning our very neighbor
In thought, word, and deed, we′ve failed You, our King
How deeply we need a Savior”

The first verse opens with echoes of the Confession of Sin from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done," and leads us into an admission of our sin and guilt before a holy God. It confesses that we are included in the "all" of Romans 3:23: "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (ESV), and recognizes that we are in need of a savior.

Verse 2

“For what You have done, Your life of love
You perfectly lived, we praise You
Though tempted and tried, You fixed Your eyes
You finished the work God gave You

And there on the tree, a King among thieves
You bled for a world’s betrayal
You loved to the end, our merciful friend
How pure and forever faithful”

The second verse then moves to God's response to our dilemma in the work and person of Jesus Christ. Here we have portrayed the work of Christ in his humiliation [1]. This is the Christ who "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant...he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:6-8, ESV). This verse speaks of His active obedience ("You perfectly lived...though tempted and tried...") so that "by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous" (Romans 5:19, ESV), and of his passive obedience (that is, the obedience during His passion, His death on the cross).

Both are lovely verses and the music is good, but I didn't want to just leave the song where it ended. As it is, it ends with the Protestant's objection to the crucifix: "You loved to the end, our merciful friend / How pure and forever faithful." If this is "the end" then the song winds up leaving Jesus on the cross [2]. How then can he show the mercy we cry for in the chorus?

Verse 3

In my mind, the next logical verse then was to follow up the work of Christ in his humiliation with His work in his exaltation. This is the Jesus whom God raised up and exalted to His right hand (Acts 2) and of whom the book of Hebrews speaks extensively of as our High Priest. This is the direction I wanted to take with the new verse:

“Raised to the right hand, the Son of Man,
You are there a priest forever
The veil torn away, Your blood now saves
It washes the worst transgressor

In heaven above, you show your great love
You stand before God the Father
For us intercede, our perfect High Priest!
Remember our sins no longer”

This verse opens by raising Jesus both from His death that ended the second verse and to the right hand of God, as confessed in the Psalm quoted by Peter above and throughout Hebrews. This Psalm also speaks of Jesus being made a priest forever (after the order of Melchizidek, though I was not about to try to fit that name into the meter or rhyme scheme). It also now provides a reasoning whereby we can ask for mercy: the blood of Jesus which justifies us (Romans 5) and sanctifies us (Hebrews 9).

Finally, I draw on Romans 8: "Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" (ESV). When we come to Him to ask for mercy, then, we can have confidence that He will hear us, and will then do as he promised by the prophet: "For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more" (Jeremiah 31:34, ESV). He who we cry "Lord have mercy! Christ have mercy! Lord have mercy!" to will do it (1 John 1:9).

Footnotes

[1] At the time we sang this and I started writing the new verse, I was working my way through Herman Bavinck's The Wonderful Works of God, and was right around (or perhaps just past) his chapters "The Work of Christ in His Humiliation" and "The Work of Christ in His Exaltation," without which I probably wouldn't have been thinking in these terms.

[2] There are certain settings where this kind of construct could work (thinking along the lines of a Good Friday service, perhaps), but I don't think it does here, where the song is served better by being able to be a self-contained unit.

Stars

in your multitudes
scarce to be counted
filling the darkness
with order and light
you are the sentinels
silent and sure
keeping watch in the night.

One of the not quite smaller joys of our trips to the beach is that more of the night sky is visible from the deck of whichever house we've rented for the week than we could possibly see at home. It's hardly perfect there either, you can't really make out the Milky Way with the naked eye, but better is still, actually, better. While we were there I downloaded the Night Sky app to help make sense of what I was looking at. What I originally supposed to be Mars was, infact, its opposite (literally - it was Antares). I learned to be able to identify the constellations that dominated the southern sky which our house was facing - mostly Scorpius and Sagittarius.

Considering Idalia (rated a tropical storm by the time she passed to our near south) came through during the middle of the week, we had remarkably good weather for appreciating the night sky. The night of the storm, Wednesday, was really the only night that was entirely a wash - the skies were mostly clear and the moon was mostly full all the other nights.

Full moons pose a challenge of their own, of course. They are sneakily brighter than we realize and so you can really only expose for the moon or the stars and landscape, but not both. I took some exposed for just the moon at f/11 at 1/160-1/25s. Those for the stars were at f/1.4 at 1-5s - that's about 15 stops of difference (32,000 times the light) between the far ends of those ranges. By the time I get enough light to shoot the stars, the moon looks like the sun - a blinding bright spot that washes out everything around it.

I'm no astrophotographer, but playing around for it for the week with mildly favorable conditions has me appreciating the appeal.

The Outside World

That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

It has been an interesting week to consider the world beyond my front door. My own particular front door is in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, twenty-some miles outside of Washington, D.C. This Sunday afternoon, while my wife and I were sitting and talking in our living room, our four-year-old was playing on our front porch (I think our older was in her room upstairs). With no warning, we suddenly heard a mighty boom or a crash. I don't remember noticing anything shake, but three of us - my wife and I from the inside and our son from the outside raced to the front porch.

A few months ago, we had a friend over for dinner when we heard something similar. It was February, and so it was fairly dark out even though it was barely 6:00, but as we strained to see we could just barely make out that a tree had fallen on our neighbor's house (more properly, the extension that was being constructed). That was the first thing we thought when we heard the noise, but shouting over fences to the neighbors no one seemed to have any idea whose house it might have fallen on this time.

We turned from our immediate neighbors to our virtual ones next - there were already a handful of posts asking what we all wanted to know—"WHAT WAS THAT BIG BOOM!?" When we realized it was heard as far afield as Annapolis in the east and Manassas in the west, we scrapped the tree theory. Sonic booms and earthquakes were the prevailing theories, with plenty of folks swearing that they've experience one or the other and this was not that. Eventually the cause was determined and verified, though the details why took a bit longer (and gave plenty of time for the conspiracy minded to construct their own stories, particularly since they could point to all the people that said it wasn't like any of the sonic booms they've experienced).

But there was that brief period of time when all the explanations were only plausible, and for one reason or another would seem to fall flat. Why would there be a sonic boom? There was no advance notice of training or drills. _If_ this were an earthquake, why didn't USGS seem to have any measurements? You find yourself thinking there was no reason to think it was anything disastrous, but if it was, how would you know? What signs and signals am I missing? I found myself trying to rewind our DVR to see if I could hear it on the broadcast of the Nationals baseball game. No one there seemed to be in a panic. There was nothing else across Twitter/Reddit that suggested something bad so everything is...probably fine. Right?

We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite?

The back half of the week has had a different hue (quite literally). While it hasn't been as dramatic here (and thankfully so) as it has been in New York City, we are also feeling the effects of the Quebecois wild fires. We first felt the effects of it in earnest yesterday as the Air Quality Index (a new metric which everyone is suddenly quite conversant in) shot up and we could smell the smoke in the air and feel it tickle our throats.

The outdoor events for our kids—the one at kindergarten and the other at a pre-school summer camp—have been curtailed, the neighborhood pools also closed (not that they are warm enough to be enticing anyway). I found myself thinking about Dom DeLillo's White Noise and its airborne toxic event. You can go outside, and if you do, something vageuly bad may happen to you at some unspecified point in the future. No one's really sure.

I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

I am following along with Gracy Olmstead’s book club she is running through her Substack Granola, which is reading through Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. My goal will be to use this space to record my own impressions of the readings. This reading follows the first week, which includes the first half of Chapter 1, where all the quotes have been taken from.

A Year of Reading

I have always been something of a sporadic reader (sometimes I would say a "reading camel"—I could read a few books in short order and then not really read much of anything for months and months at a time.) Last year, around Christmastime, I had added Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow to my Amazon list, and my parents gave it to me for Christmas. After reading it (twice), I kept the pattern going by starting through a handful of books that had been neglected or half-started on my shelves. For most of the year, I managed to stay reading fairly consistently. There were gaps here or there, but often at night I would sit down in bed and read however many pages before calling it a night and going to sleep. I don't have any set goals for anything, each book tends to have its own velocity, some are simply easier to read than others. Particularly for reading before bed, fiction or some kind of narrative works best, it can be hard to read too many dense paragraphs of theology or political philosophy before my eyelids lose the battle with gravity. (There have been exceptions to this, however!)

I generally keep track of what I'm reading on GoodReads, and I have an ever-growing list of books that I want to read at some point. I often take recommendations from various newsletters that I subscribe to and other folks that I follow on Twitter. I've rarely been steered wrong by those.

Top Five

These I will list as my favorite five books that I read all year.

Jayber Crow (Wendell Berry)

This is somewhat tongue in cheek, but in some ways I started at the top and it was all downhill from there. I've never particularly been able to identify with folks that say they've read the Lord of the Rings trilogy or whatever umpteen times, I can't think of any book, really, that I've read more than once, or read multiple times within, say, ten years. My second reading of this was about two weeks after I finished it the first time, because I realized I simply wanted to spend more time in that world, and with those characters, and I've collected a handful more of his books about the Port William Membership since, but this remains my favorite among them. (I'm contemplating re-reading this one again when I finish my current stack in progress.)

Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)

I picked this up on a whim from the library this fall. At more than 850 pages, it's quite a long one, and having a train ride to Connecticut and some downtime while with friends there helped me get through it before the loan expired. Like Jayber Crow, McMurtry built a fascinating world that made it easy to keep reading.

Home (Marylinne Robinson)

A follow-on novel set in Gilead, but focused on Glory and Jack. The exploration of the alienation felt by those two, in different ways, resonated with me, and this may have been my favorite of the series (up there with Gilead.)

The Uncontrollability of the World (Hartmut Rosa)

One of those non-fiction exceptions to being able to read at night without losing the thread of the argument, it seems to present a sharp argument of what happens when Ellul's technological society continues on to its natural end.

My Life in France (Julia Child)

Child's memoirs of her years studying cooking in France while her husband served in the foreign service through her time developing her book and cooking show in the States. I found it engaging and entertaining.

The Full List

  • Jayber Crow (Wendell Barry) - 5/5
  • Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut) - 3/5
  • The Voyage of the Narwhal (Andrea Barrett) - 3/5
  • Art & Faith (Makoto Fujimura) - 3/5
  • Jack (Marylinne Robinson) - 4/5
  • Hannah Coulter (Wendell Berry) - 5/5
  • Silas Marner (George Eliot) - 3/5
  • Calico Joe (John Grisham) - 1/5
  • The Uncontrollability of the World (Hartmut Rosa) - 4/5
  • All That's Good (Hannah Anderson) - 3/5
  • The Memory of Old Jack (Wendell Berry) - 5/5
  • Blackout (Connie Willis) - 3/5
  • Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) - 3/5
  • A World Lost (Wendell Berry) - 3/5
  • Tools for Conviviality (Ivan Illich) - 3/5
  • All Clear (Connie Willis) - 3/5
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather) - 4/5
  • Housekeeping (Marylinne Robinson) - 2/5
  • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie) - 3/5
  • My Life in France (Julia Child) - 4/5
  • The World Beyond Your Head (Matthew B. Crawford) - 4/5
  • Humble Roots (Hannah Anderson) - 3/5
  • Home (Marylinne Robinson) - 5/5
  • The Twilight World (Werner Herzog) - 5/5
  • A Place on Earth (Wendell Berry) - 5/5
  • Piranesi (Susannah Clarke) - 4/5
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig) - 2/5
  • Sea of Tranquility (Emily St. John Mandel) - 3/5
  • Barracoon (Zora Neale Hurston) - 3/5
  • Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry) - 5/5
  • The Human Condition (Hannah Ardent) - 4/5
  • Remembering (Wendell Berry) - 3/5
  • The World Cannot Give (Tara Isabella Burton) - 4/5
  • Lila (Marylinne Robinson) - 3/5
  • Walden (Henry David Thoreau) - 2/5
  • Women Talking (Miriam Toews) - 4/5
  • Crossroads (Jonathan Franzen) - 4/5

Children's Books

Most nights I try to read to Abby, my oldest, before she goes to bed as well. We'll bounce between some of the short picture books she brings home from the school library and some longer form books that I've picked out. Her favorte of the latter I'm pretty sure is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When I told her that there was a book called that, I'm pretty sure that the fact that chocolate was involved was enough to make it a sight-unseen (book-unread) favorite. We are currently re-reading it. I've listed the other books I've read with her below, with my ratings attached to them.

  • Charlotte's Web (E.B. White) - 4/5
  • Stuart Little (E.B. White) - 3/5
  • Skunk & Badger (Amy Timberlake) - 3/5
  • The Trumpet of the Swan (E.B. White) - 3/5
  • Egg Marks the Spot (Amy Timberlake) - 3/5
  • Zita the Spacegirl (Ben Hatke) - 3/5
  • The BFG (Roald Dahl) - 3/5
  • Charlie and the Chocoate Factory (Roald Dahl) - 4/5
  • The Tale of Despereaux (Kate DiCamillo) - 4/5

A New Home

Before Timothy was born, we had used the third upstairs bedroom as a shared home office. Jamie had her desk and work computer and et cetera up there, and I had a desk and my monitor and trusty little Mac Mini, and my photo printer too. When we were pregnant with him, we transitioned Jamie's office to a corner in our basement. My own setup was deemed surplus to requirements at the time, as I could get by with just my laptop for most everything anyway. The desk, which I had built out of various Ikea components and had likely made one move too many was junked. The photo printer was sent to live with my parents, and the rest—the monitor, the Mini, and the accessories and décor I had accumulated—were scattered to various places of storage.

Jamie has finally been promoted to a window office. We ran a new ethernet line to the fireplace room so we could move her office into there, and so I bought a new desk and put it where hers had been. It felt good to retrieve the boxes out of storage and closets, to feel like I have "a place" that can be my own. After I got the essentials set up, I figured I should do some cleaning out of the bin that I had shoved everything in when I was putting my things away three years ago: a couple of folios; a handful of picture frames; some knicknacks and mementos—streetmaps from our trip to Spain and Morocco, the program from Stephen Strasburg's debut start, some hand-written notes; more cables that are unlikely to ever be used again; a hulking iomega external hard drive that weighs a couple of pounds and for which I'm pretty sure I lost the power supply to before I was married; and a cell phone from five or six years ago.

I ended up shoving the latter two items in another drawer with some electronics of similar pedigree because I didn't want to have to think about what it would take to dispose of them right now. They'll be a problem for another day, more likely another year. The decision of keep or toss always feels harder than it should be. Tossing anything seems wrong if it has potential, no matter how unlikely it is to be realized. Every once in a while I wonder if the chief end of man is not to just accumulate junk you don't know how to get rid of. You have a vague hope that, when you're gone, your legacy isn't the days and weeks it takes those left behind to sort through what is worthwhile. Perhaps our wills should include an apology for the mess. I imagined myself a museum curator of my own life—here is an artifact, and here is why it has meaning. Here is my dog Charlie Brown's collar, I wasn't strong enough to be in the room with him when they put him down. Here is a tin from Scotland where I learned about whiskey fudge, and this is why I started making it at Christmastime. Here is a stack of USB cables, it just seemed wasteful to throw them out.

After I had unpacked and sorted the bin of things, repacking some for another time, I took it back to the extra bedroom to be refilled. There were enough things losely stored in the closet that it made sense to try and organize it at least a little bit more. There were some boxes of graphing paper and empty spiral-bound notebooks alongside my yearbooks from middle and high school. There was also a stack of calendars from about 2013 to 2020, I think missing only one year. I nearly added them to the "toss" pile, but couldn't do it. They were yearly gifts from a couple of my photographer friends, and it just seemed appropriate that they would live next to the yearbooks. In a way, that's what they were. More artifacts. Our next house ought to come with a basement that's just rows and rows of drawers. We can organize them all by year.

An empty desk is a strange thing, because it seems entirely filled with potential. How we arrange the objects on it, how we decorate it becomes how we use it. The desk I got has a couple of small shelves making a small "L" to my right. Beyond hiding my router and Mac Mini and network drive, I don't know yet what to fill them with. The same goes for the walls I have in my little corner. We've never been good about getting things up on the walls, but Jamie had hung her work awards around hers, and they went upstairs with the rest of her office. I'd like to put up some prints at some point. I'll have to decide which should be given the honor. I'd like to get more from friends.

To my left is a little rolling file cabinet, and sitting on top is a tupperware bin filled with the stuff and detritus that was in Jamie's office space down here that did not make the move. The cycle begins anew.

In this Economy?

With news about the CDC's updated mask guidance and states and governors following suit ending executive orders requiring masking orders in various settings, I've had the occasion to think back on a paragraph I wrote at the start of the pandemic.

I keep on thinking about John Carpenter’s THE THING and how I should finally watch it if I end up on quarantine. Someone argued in the early days of the outbreak, as we were just watching it unfold over there in China how most people don’t really respond to significant threats with panic, but what is more likely to happen is that the people as a community come together in support of one another, invoking the “togetherness” following 9-11 and the bonds formed during the Blitz on London. The Blitz, in particular, seemed a rather poor analogy to be making. There was a vast threat facing London, but its character was entirely different. Safety and camaraderie was found huddling together in close quarters in air raid shelters and tube lines, which is less advisable in a viral pandemic. More importantly, the threat there was always external. There was no bomb the Germans could drop that would turn you into a Nazi. With the coronavirus, you become victim and, while contagious, silent, unwitting enemy.

I still haven't watched THE THING, but in my defense, I was never quarantined. I think what strikes me most is that last line, and the way in which it has unfolded. It seems that that idea, or since we're fond of talking about them now, a variant of that idea, has become internalized in an unhelpful and dangerous manner. The mutation that has occurred is "with the coronavirus, you become the victim and they become the enemy."

We, of course, are not the enemies in our own stories. And we know that we are doing everything right, or at least we're doing enough of it. Wearing the masks, minding our six feet, getting our shots, making Hamilton references about not throwin' away our shot. But the enemy, the enemy is out there, prowling like a roaring lion, seeking those whom they may infect. They are the un-washed, the un-vaccinated, and the un-masked. To steal from Seinfeld, the only thing between us and them is a thin layer of gabardine. They, on the other hand, are out there, Jerry, and they're loving it. I suppose I'm not surprised that this is a common reaction, at least among the portion of people who think it important that their reactions be known. Twitter and Facebook and social media in general are not "real life," but they do speak for some representative subset of it.

Americans seem to be haunted by the idea of fraud. It shows up as a bogeyman everywhere, from electoral politics to the pandemic. If I'm being hopeful, I'd suggest that it's because fraud is a mirror vice to fairness, which is antithetical to the myth of America and the American dream, but I'm not convinced on that point. The first question everyone seemed to be asking when the CDC said that vaccinated people need not worry about masking was, "Well, how do we know who's vaccinated?" When Dr. Fauci answered Jake Tapper's version of the question, he said, in effect, that you're going to have to trust them, and the howls went up. "Trust? In this economy?" We are, apparently, past that.

Maybe make it we're post that. In that same post I quoted before, I talked about the idea, borrowed from others, of a post-trust society. Originally, that notion was directed towards the sorts of institutions that had always assumed some sort of level of trust from the general society, the government and its various agencies, the news media, the academy. Of course the last fourteen months have been an incredible exercise in seeing which of these groups could operate a credibility shredder at the highest capacity at times, but there is another way the idea of a post-trust society could be imagined, and it has possibly more serious consequences. What happens when a society has no trust among its constituent members?

I don't know that there's any particular way to solve that problem, certainly at a macro level, I suspect the gains to be had there must come at an individual level. I suppose this is why I appreciated Joseph Keegin's essay "Be Not Afraid" in Breaking Ground. He focuses on fear (particularly fear driven by outrage media cynics) as a source of the sort of societal breakdown we're seeing. Questions, for example, of "how can they really know who is vaccinated?" are ultimately driven not so much by a concern for fairness ("who's playing by the rules?") as they are fear ("how do I know they won't hurt me?").

A fear that leads only to the suspicion of our fellow man is a fear that leads unto death, both for ourselves and for our society. Later Keegin adds, "If we can find a way to form communities built on a mutual concern for the good of one another—or (perhaps more importantly) to bring this concern into the communities of which we are already a part—we will find ourselves less susceptible" to the sort of fear that drives us apart. But this can't be some sort of blandly theoretical venture.

Christianity can never be mere theory—it must inform how we live, both individually and collectively. Our theorizing must be understood as part of our long, arduous journey toward mutual edification. We are our brothers’ keepers, and we must concern ourselves with the good of those we love and work to aid in their flourishing.

The admonition that we are our brother's keepers is an one that calls us to approach our relationships with one another with an honest desire for their good, and I'm not at all convinced that concerning ourselves with the good of those we love is equivalent to seeing that they come around on every point of whichever version of the culture war we find ourselves fighting with them. There are greater goods than mask policy.