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I ended the post with a quote from an essay I wrote titled “From the Green Book to the River: Lewis, Relativism, and Constructivism in Education” which was published in the very first issue of An Unexpected Journal on Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis.^[2]

That essay was actually inspired by the drama of the selection of Elizabeth Fagen as superintendent for Humble ISD (Texas) in 2016. I have written about that over the years as it was a turning point in my life. It was when I began to realize that people that I thought I could trust, maybe weren’t that trustworthy after all.^[3] It was the aftermath of Fagen’s appointment and the barrage of outside political interference in the 2017 Humble ISD school board election to keep the incumbents who hired her in their seats that made me realize that it wasn’t just local individuals that couldn’t be trusted, but the Republican party as a whole that wasn’t really looking out for the welfare of me, my family, or community.^[4]

The Legacy of Elizabeth Fagen

When I began researching Fagen’s history after waking up to a flurry of frantic text messages after her selection was announced on that May morning in 2016, I realized that her philosophy towards education was what C.S. Lewis warned against in Abolition of Man.^[5] I had just turned in my last paper on AOM for the Research and Writing class in the cultural apologetics masters program at Houston Baptist University, and here was the “Green Book” staring me in the face in our own school district.

Two years later, when we were launching the first issue of An Unexpected Journal on Lewis’s Abolition of Man, I wanted to write about what was going down in our school district that had been taken over by Fagen and her crew, but I didn’t want it to be obviously about our school district because, really … who else would be interested?

Education vs Education Gone Bad

The essay I wrote was on the purpose of education, the true nature of pedagogy, and the danger when that purpose of education is corrupted and pedagogy is devalued and distorted. What our district was in the middle of, and what Fagen had subjected her previous district to (Douglas County ISD in Colorado), was always in the back of my mind as I wrote the essay. The parents of Fagen’s previous district had done what they could to warn us, to help us fight against her hiring, and to prepare us for what was coming in our district under her direction. In my mind, I was writing the essay to honor the efforts of those parents who had fought for eight long years to rid their district of Fagen’s destructive touch; especially the moms who never let up and never let anyone forget how Fagen had brought their once stand-out district low.

That essay was for them: the Hellcats of Douglas County.

The War of Ideologies

The text of the essay doesn’t mention either Fagen or the school district … but both are prominently featured in the footnotes. Reading the footnotes alone, you would see the ideologies of Elizabeth Fagen and C.S. Lewis at war. I’ve mentioned this. Often. I out the shadiness of our district in footnotes every time I can manage it.

That was six years ago. At one point, a digital version of the AUJ: Abolition of Man issue was sent to people as a bonus for signing up for the journal newsletter. Physical and digital copies have found their way into various research libraries. As every issue and essay that An Unexpected Journal has published is available to read online as open access, it has always surprised me how many digital issues of that particular issue would sell year in and year out.

Sabotage and An Unexpected Journal

I’ve spent the past five months chronicling how my devices have been hacked and my platforms have been targeted and sabotaged.^[6] I have also shared that I believe that the attacks are politically motivated and funded by the Republican war machine.^[7]

I think this is for two reasons. The first is that I represent the biggest threat to the GOP: a white, educated, evangelical woman who is still conservative, but will no longer vote Republican. I am the prototype of what the Lincoln Project refers to as “the moveable middle.^[8]” Democrats need more of me. Republicans want to silence me. I am the personification of the existential threat to the GOP, and that is why I think they are funding a steady stream of contractors to hack, harass, and sabotage me.^[9]

Republicans don’t want my voice to be heard because I threaten every one of the false narratives in their platform. They try to convince people that if they don’t vote for the Republican candidate, they aren’t a good Christian.^[10] They push lies about immigration.^[11] They try to push a distorted view of “Biblical” gender relations and roles.^[12] They even try to push a false view of humanity and personhood.^[13]

In this livestream on stolen words on contraception, I discuss what makes us human. Livestream article. Some of those stolen words, “What is the Purpose of Sex?”

The heavy sabotage began in 2021, escalated in 2024, and is still continuing. But what I haven’t talked about as much, and what I actually recognized first, was the sabotage to An Unexpected Journal.

I think there is a siphoning off of royalties of the journal, which may or may not be related to the political sabotage. What seemed odd to me is that over the years, regardless of the increase in the number of issues we had available for sale, the monthly royalties never seemed to increase. I realized that everything could be read online and that we were in an odd sort of niche, but it still seemed strange to me that from month to month and as we added issue after issue that the sales never seemed to grow.

The cause for that became more apparent earlier this year when we discovered a bootleg issue of the Advent 2023 Dostoevsky issue of An Unexpected Journal on Amazon. It was reported, pulled for a short time, and then the bootleg issue was back live on Amazon outranking the journal’s actual issue. I have not been in leadership for the journal other than producing the books ever, and especially since Jasmin Biggs and Jason Smith took over as Editor-in-Chief and President of the Board respectively at the beginning of 2023. Annie Nardone took over as President of the Board in June of 2024 year and a decision was made to have Jason Smith handle the nuts and bolts of the production and publishing of the journal through his publishing company, Wootton Major Press, at the same time, so the burden of production was entirely off my plate. The last issue I had involvement with was the assembly of the manuscript and cover for the Modernity issue (Spring 2024), which I then handed over to Jason Smith to actually publish on the distribution platforms.

If you’ve followed An Unexpected Journal through the years, you will have noticed that the website for the journal has a new look. Grant Broadhurst took it over and rebuilt the site on the Extra theme from Elegant Themes. He wanted to do the redesign as he said he wanted to start a business doing websites.

The new look is updated and modernized; however, this is my perspective as someone who has done website development and worked with small businesses and brands for twenty years: the new look bore absolutely no connection to the branding that the journal had built up over the past six years. The previous colors were black, gold and an accent of red. The feel was more aged and focused towards books. The new theme is green and white and, quite frankly, I question whether or not it might infringe on existing Tolkien and Lord of the Rings trademarks and branding.]

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If you didn’t know what An Unexpected Journal was, you would have no idea that you had come across a site for an actual publication. There is no link on the entire site to buy an actual book and you have to navigate three pages in to even discover that you could subscribe to the journal. (This was when the new design first launched. The ability to subscribe has now been completely removed.) It looks like a random blog, maybe even a blog ripping off content from an actual publication. You would have no way of knowing because you would have to do an entire investigation to figure out what the site was.

Beyond the branding and look of the site, the category structure of the site was changed. If you are familiar with web development, you know that is the number one rule of a website redesign: don’t touch the site structure unless you must, and if you must, map out redirects and make sure that new site structure is seeded in to search. A good percentage of the essays were unpublished during the transition. The original collection pages for the contributions in each issue were at first unpublished and when published, no longer in the crawlable site structure.

The redirection plugin used previously, Pretty Links, was deleted. The result was that six years of short links published across the web and in every issue published until that point were no longer valid.

All of this could be attributed to ignorance. None of those structural changes were necessary to change the look of the site. The site runs on Wordpress. The theme could have been changed, the theme settings adjusted, and the rest could have remained as it was.

I did give feedback on all of these things, assuming that none of them … Grant, Jasmin, or Jason … were aware of the impact of the changes made. But that is all I could do … give feedback. I was not in charge and was only one person on the board. They chose not to take the feedback. As all this was going on while I was under a barrage of hacking attacks, I left it. Again, I was not in charge.

Two of out the 200-page report I submitted to the FBI in July 2024 illustrating the publishing scam and royalty theft that the journal issue was being targeted by.

This was throughout the first months of 2024. In May 2024, Seth Myers brought the bootleg version of the Dostoevsky issue on Amazon to the attention of the board. Actually, I didn’t realize at first it was a bootleg version. The bootleg version was listed as a preorder … in May 2024 for an issue that had been published since December 2023. As that was an issue I had uploaded to the distribution platforms, I investigated it and discovered that it was a bootleg version published on an owned ISBN — owned by someone other than AUJ. After I discovering this, I recognizing that the publication date was extended daily, I realized this had to be part of a larger system of royalty and intellectual property theft. This was included in my report to the FBI in July.

To recap the timeline: the first months of 2024 saw change after change to the journal website that, as I told someone, if you were trying to tank the journal site in search, you couldn’t have done a better job. There was not just one bootleg version of the journal on Amazon, but every single issue had a bootleg doppleganger copy listed on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. My essay, “The Making of a Hero,” was being sabotaged in search with weird urls indexed and manipulated excerpts displaying in search. I discovered that my work had been stolen and people I knew were involved.

Then in August, we had a meeting for feedback on the cover for the fall issue of the journal on Community. Look at that cover. Look at every other cover that has come before and tell me your thoughts. Everyone else on the board that gave feedback on the cover liked it. As I said in my update announcing my resignation from the board for the journal, very obviously our ideas of what is “good” and the standard for the journal have diverged.^[14]

Immediately after the board meeting discussing the cover, we had more of a discussion on the bootleg Dostoevsky issue, as it was now live and for sale on Amazon. Jasmin Biggs, the Editor-in-Chief, said that the position the board had decided on was to “report and move on.” I also saw that the writers’ agreement had been edited in September 2023. I didn’t bother investigating how. At that point, I decided I was done. We could have had an unpublished work from C.S. Lewis himself in that issue and I still wouldn’t have promoted it with that horrendous cover.

It’s one thing to be hit by sabotage. It’s something entirely different to be in a group of people who are, at the very least, complacent to that sabotage.

I removed myself and shut myself off from that avenue of exposure and attack.

One final word on the Community issue before I move on to what I believe is the original source and motivation of the sabotage. The Community issue is available in Kindle Unlimited. If you are familiar with the rules for publishing in Kindle Unlimited, the book has to be exclusive on Amazon. It cannot be published on any other platform, including your own website. This is why previous issues of the journal were never available in Kindle Unlimited. We published them on multiple other platforms in addition to selling subscriptions, not to mention the fact that every contribution is available for free on the journal website. This makes the journal issues ineligible from being in Kindle Unlimited. The journal account with Amazon KDP could be closed for this.

Politically Motivated Sabotage

While writing this update and quoting the constructivism essay from the Abolition of Man issue, I pulled up the PDF of my essay from the issue. Scrolling through through the footnotes, number twelve stood out to me.

12 Note: The claim constructivists believe teachers can be replaced

with technology may seem far-fetched; however, it actually played out

in the Douglas County Independent School District in Colorado. Along

with a series of other district actions, the position of teacher was so

devalued that administration saw the portrayal of a teacher in front of

a classroom as completely unrepresentative of the district. Below is

the text of a response to an approval request for a promotional piece by

then DCISD superintendent Elizabeth Fagen. The email was obtained

through a Freedom of Information request by Douglas County parents.

Elizabeth Fagen, "Re: Flat Earth Promo," June 25, 2015, accessed

January 31, 2018, http://douglascountyparents.com/fagen-move-theteacher-

to-the-side/.

"The one thing that bothers me is that we have a teacher in front

of the class with a book…that’s the anthesis [sic] of us and what we

aspire to offer our kids. :) So…can that visual either move the teacher

to the side without the book or just have kids with robot? I think it’s a

key moment. :)"

Under Fagen's direction, the educational philosophy was strongly

constructivist. See commentary on a district sponsored article by Rick

Hess on EdWeek titled "Douglas County: The Most Interesting District

in America?" dated September 18, 2013. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rickhessstraightup/2013/09

/douglascountythemostinterestingschooldistrictin_america.html

Fagen didn’t think that a picture of a teacher with children was a good representation of the Douglas County ISD … a public school district. She wanted a robot in the picture. That was more her style.

Here I am, battling hacking and sabotage from people who have not only stolen every thing I have published and used it to build an AI model based on that work, but also my random thoughts and experiences that I have shared informally on social media, and now want to eliminate me from public view because what I have to say threatens their business based on theft and deception.

The person their AI model is based upon is too much of a problem, so they just want to get rid of the person and keep the model.^[15]

And I think this is the same thing Greg Abbott and the State of Texas are trying to do with teachers.^[16]

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Humans are too “troublesome.^[17]” They have a mind of their own and can’t be reliably controlled. I think those purchase orders for $35 billion in pens and $32 billion in printer supplies were actually funneled to those same “friends” who built an AI model off of my work to build an AI model and virtual education system that would completely replace Texas physical public schools.^[18]

I think we were right when we were convinced that Fagen was being brought in to implement vouchers.^[19] (Or at least was, it turns out she is too much of a problem as well, but in an entirely different way).^[20]

I thought the sabotage of An Unexpected Journal was because a maliciously petty person with access to the means and political funding just wanted to attack me personally and the journal was something I had poured my heart into.

Maybe it wasn’t personal. Maybe it was all political and commercial.

Maybe whoever came up with the idea to sabotage the journal thought that if they could drive AUJ into folding that, as with any nonprofit, the assets would be turned over to another nonprofit and they assumed that would include the copyright to the contributed essays. They would then have control over the essay with the unflattering Fagen footnotes that they could bury.^[21]

The thing is, AUJ does NOT own the copyright to the contributions.

The writers’ agreement for An Unexpected Journal granted the journal the exclusive right to publish for the first 90 days after publication of the issue it is featured in and a nonexclusive right after that. AUJ has rights to a specific use, the writer maintained the copyright.

If that was the plan, it was a bad one founded on ignorance.

The Tell Is In the Response

I do think that was the plan.

Almost everything I have discovered has been the result of the response of the perpetrators to something I said or did. The tell is always in the response.

I published the first part of “$35 billion in pens” on Substack on October 28th and included a PDF of my essay on constructivism. I wrote the majority of this post the next day, but, as I have mentioned, I’ve been continually hacked and my platforms sabotaged. I was focused on documenting the attacks.

Finishing this post in December, I opened that PDF of my essay again to grab the text of that footnote #12, and guess what? I couldn’t select the full text of Fagen’s comment. Somehow the PDF had been sabotaged in a way that made that text no longer selectable. (Converting it to an image?)

If you’re thinking, “Well that’s dumb. What good does that do?”

You’re right it doesn’t accomplish anything other than slowing down someone who wants to copy the quote. But maybe the point was making the text so it isn’t scannable by search engines.

School superintendents saying they want to replace teachers with robots is never a good look.

Again, the tell is always in the response and I do think that is exactly the plan.

Referenced Substack Posts

Endnotes

^[1] Carla Sallee Alvarez. “$35 Billion in Pens.” Substack newsletter. Raised to Walk with Carla Sallee Alvarez (blog), October 28, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2024 https://raisedtowalk.substack.com/p/35-billion-in-pens.

^[2] C. M. Alvarez, “From The Green Book to The River: Lewis, Relativism, and Constructivism in Education.” An Unexpected Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 121–41. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://raisedtowalk.substack.com/p/from-the-green-book-to-the-river.

^[3] Carla M. Sallee Alvarez, “On Elections, Faith, and Parties.” Blog. Raised to Walk, November 6, 2018. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://raisedtowalk.org/foreign-land/on-elections-faith-and-parties/.

^[4] C.M. Alvarez, “Just Trust Us.” Efusion Media Group (blog), May 2017. https://efusionmg.com/hisd/just-trust-us.html.

^[5] Cory McCord, “Controversy Surrounds Humble ISD Superintendent Finalist.” KHOU, May 25, 2016. Accessed January 1, 2025. https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/controversy-surrounds-humble-isd-superintendent-finalist/285-215188940.

Elizabeth Fernandez, “As Superintendent Liz Fagen Departs, Douglas County Parents Celebrate and Texas Parents Petition” The Denver Post, May 25, 2016. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://www.denverpost.com/2016/05/25/as-fagen-leaves-schools-dougco-parents-celebrate-texas-parents-petition/.

Tom Abrahams, “Humble Superintendent Wants Parents to Ignore Controversy and Give Her a Shot - ABC13 Houston.” ABC Eyewitness News, July 11, 2016. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://abc13.com/humble-isd-superintendent-dr-elizabeth-fagen-liz/1422690/.

Alvaro “Al” Ortiz, “Humble ISD Board Of Trustees Approves Hiring Elizabeth Fagen As New Superintendent.” Houston Public Media, June 15, 2016. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2016/06/15/156898/humble-isd-board-of-trustees-approves-hiring-elizabeth-fagen-as-new-superintendent/.

Mark Boyle, “Liz Fagen Is Sole Finalist for Houston Position.” Denver 7. Accessed January 13, 2025. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://www.denver7.com/lifestyle/education/douglas-county-schools-superintendent-liz-fagen-leaving-for-position-in-texas.

Egberto Willies, “Dr. Elizabeth Fagen Appointed next Superintendent of Humble ISD.” EgbertoWillies.com, June 15, 2016. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://egbertowillies.com/2016/06/15/dr-elizabeth-fagen-officially-appointed-next-superintendent-humble-isd/.

Diane Ravitch, “Colorado: Controversial Superintendent of DougCo Resigns.” Diane Ravitch’s Blog (blog), May 25, 2016. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/05/25/colorado-controversial-superintendent-of-dougco-resigns/.

Egberto Willies, “School District Parents Trying to Save Their Kids from Dysfunctional Superintendent (VIDEO).” Blog. EgbertoWillies.com, June 13, 2016. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://egbertowillies.com/2016/06/12/humble-isd-parents-continue-quest/.

Jennifer Bauer, “Humble ISD Superintendent Seated after Months of Parent Protest.” Click2Houston, July 11, 2016. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://www.click2houston.com/news/2016/07/11/humble-isd-superintendent-seated-after-months-of-parent-protest/.

Brian Malone, “Education Inc Transcript.” Media Education Foundation, 2015. accessed January 13, 2025. https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Education-Inc-Transcript.pdf.

^[6] Carla M. Sallee Alvarez, “Hacked: The Saga.” Blog. Raised to Walk, August 2024. https://raisedtowalk.org/hacked-the-saga/.

^[7] Carla M. Sallee Alvarez, “Hey, Ted Cruz! I’m Not Going Anywhere.” Blog. Raised to Walk (blog), August 22, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://raisedtowalk.org/hacked/hey-ted-cruz-im-not-going-anywhere/.

Carla Sallee Alvarez, “On Obstructions, Sabotage, & Politics.” Substack newsletter. Raised to Walk with Carla Sallee Alvarez (blog), September 4, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://raisedtowalk.substack.com/p/on-obstructions-sabotage-and-politics.

^[8] Mark Imerman, “The Moveable Middle and Statistics.” Substack newsletter. My Two Cents (blog), November 25, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025.

My Two Cents

The Moveable Middle and Statistics

When I am not babbling on Substack, I have a small business, Regional Strategic, Ltd. (www.regionalstrategic.com). We engage in issues of regional economics: economic impact studies for existing enterprises and new initiatives, business planning and pro forma financial projections for new and growing businesses, and market and policy analyses (they are …

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2 years ago · Mark Imerman

.

Allison Norlian, “Anti-Trump PAC ‘The Lincoln Project’ Launching ‘Lincoln Women,’ Led By Prominent GOP Women.” August 24, 2020. Forbes, August 24, 2020. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/allisonnorlian/2020/08/24/exclusive-anti-trump-pac-the-lincoln-project-launching-lincoln-women-led-by-prominent-gop-women/.

^[9] Nancy L Cohen, “Opinion | Republican Women Are in Crisis.” The New York Times, December 31, 2019, accessed January 13, 2025. sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/opinion/republican-party-women.html.

Ronald Brownstein, “Educated White Women Were Already Recoiling from Trump. Then Came Kavanaugh. | CNN Politics.” CNN, October 2, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/02/politics/trump-brett-kavanaugh-turning-point-election-educated-white-women-voters/index.html.

William H Frey, “Educated White Women Could Trigger a Decisive Trump Defeat.” Brookings Institute, August 16, 2016. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/educated-white-women-could-trigger-a-decisive-trump-defeat/.

Philip Elliott, “College-Educated Women Are Fleeing Donald Trump. It Could Cost Him North Carolina.” TIME, October 27, 2020. https://time.com/5904482/college-educated-women-donald-trump-north-carolina/.

^[10] Alvarez, “On Elections, Faith, and Parties.”

^[11] Carla M. Sallee Alvarez, “Kabul Hope: Afghan Immigration Updates.” Blog. Raised to Walk, January 2023. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://raisedtowalk.org/kabul-hope.

^[12] Carla Alvarez @RaisedtoWalkTV, “Barbie: Biblical or Bogus? A Discussion.” YouTube, August 14, 2023.

.In this livestream discussion on The Barbie Movie (2023), the thread throughout the discussion was on the “Biblical” role of women and the messages coming from both culture and the church.

^[13] Carla M. Sallee Alvarez, “What Christians Think About Sex.” Blog. Raised to Walk (blog), October 26, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://raisedtowalk.org/hacked/what-christians-think-about-sex/.

One of the current religious issues being used to divide is the debate over when life begins and contraception. The Biblical view is given in Genesis 2. God created everything that was made. He created man (Adam) from the dust, common matter from creation.

What separates man from the rest of creation is recorded in Genesis 2:7, God “breathed” life into Adam. Unlike all of the rest of living things that exists, mankind’s life comes from God Himself (Ecclesiastes 12:7).

This is one of the things that it means to be human, to be created in God’s image (Genesis 5:2), also referred to as the imago Dei.

The question of when life, or personhood … becoming a human being, has been debated for centuries. It is this question that Roe v. Wade was actually about. The decision did not say that another person had the right to end the life of another. What court said was that if scientists, philosophers, and theologians could not tell them when life began, how could the courts rule on it?

What was left up to the mother and her doctor was balancing the health and wellbeing of the mother and the child.

Rather than answering the question that the decision posed, abortion was turned into a political football by both sides of the aisle and the real issue was lost. Now that Roe v Wade has been struck down, a new wedge issue was needed to stir up division and to manipulate and control.

That new issue is contraception and in vitro fertilization. The faction that wants to ban both is essentially taking a naturalist position in terms of human origin, leaving God out of the picture entirely.

What makes humans unique among the created is that “God breathed” spirit. We are more than simply matter. All of us have our own Genesis 2:7 moment. The question is when that moment is.

^[14] Carla M. Sallee. Alvarez, “Why I’m No Longer Associated with An Unexpected Journal.” Blog. Raised to Walk (blog), August 18, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://raisedtowalk.org/hacked/why-im-no-longer-associated-with-an-unexpected-journal/.

^[15] Carla M. Sallee Alvarez, “A Message to My Stalker.” Raised to Walk (blog), August 4, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://raisedtowalk.org/hacked/a-message-to-my-stalker/.

^[16] Jaden Edison, “Abbott Says Texas Will Pass Vouchers, School Funding in 2025.” The Texas Tribune, November 6, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/06/texas-house-greg-abbott-school-vouchers-funding/.

Megan Cardona, “Texas Public Schools Face a ‘budget Crisis’ under Gov. Greg Abbott, Teachers and Lawmakers Say | KERA News.” KERA News, May 14, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://www.keranews.org/education/2024-05-14/texas-public-schools-face-a-budget-crisis-under-gov-greg-abbott-teachers-and-lawmakers-say.

^[17] Carla Sallee Alvarez, “Serenity and the Theodicy of Joss Whedon.” Substack newsletter. Raised to Walk with Carla Sallee Alvarez (blog), December 3, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://raisedtowalk.substack.com/p/serenity-and-the-theodicy-of-joss.

^[18] Alvarez, “$35 billion in pens.”

Jack Crosbie, “Greg Abbott Reveals the GOP’s Plan After Killing Roe v. Wade: Killing Public Education.” Rolling Stone (blog), May 5, 2022. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/greg-abbott-plyler-doe-public-education-1348208/.

Roxanne Bustamante, “LULAC Responds to Texas Governor Comments to Challenge Plyler v Doe Supreme Court Decision - ABC13 Houston.” ABC 13 Eyewitness News, May 6, 2022. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://abc13.com/lulac-governor-greg-abbott-education-public/11824025/.

Giulia. Carbonaro, “Greg Abbott’s Dream of Defunding Public Schools Moves One Step Closer - Newsweek.” Newsweek, October 13, 2023. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://www.newsweek.com/greg-abbott-dream-defunding-public-schools-moves-one-step-closer-1834445.

Nora De La Cour, “Texas’s Governor Is Trying to Destroy Public Education — and Dim Those Friday Night Lights.” Jacobin, October 2023. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://jacobin.com/2023/10/greg-abbott-rural-public-schools-education-privatization-vouchers.

^[19] Patrick Svitek, “Texas Republicans Who Defied Gov. Greg Abbott on School Vouchers Face Mounting Primary Attacks - Mineral Wells Area News.” Mineral Wells Area News (blog), January 31, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://mwareanews.com/2024/01/31/texas-republicans-who-defied-gov-greg-abbott-on-school-vouchers-face-mounting-primary-attacks/.

^[20] Brooke Kushwaha, “Humble ISD Superintendent Ousted amid Husband’s Scandal.” Houston Chronicle, May 15, 2024. https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/humble-isd-superintendent-ousted-19459430.php.

Miranda Dunlap, “Investigators: Humble Superintendent’s Husband Made Sexual Remarks, Created Hostile Workplace.” Houston Landing, April 12, 2024. http://houstonlanding.org/investigators-humble-superintendents-husband-made-sexual-remarks-created-hostile-workplace/.

Adam Zuvanich, “Humble ISD Board Votes to Uphold Termination of Superintendent Elizabeth Fagen.” Houston Public Media, November 27, 2024. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/education-news/2024/11/27/507394/humble-isd-board-votes-to-uphold-termination-of-superintendent-elizabeth-fagen/.

^[21] I don’t think this is the first time they have buried media that is unflattering to the education “reform” movement. Brian Malone’s documentary, The Reformers, which tells the tale of wreckage during Fagen’s tenure at Douglas County ISD is no longer publicly available.

The Dragon in the Book of Job

People are often surprised to learn that dragons are mentioned in the Bible. As a matter of fact there is and a clear description is found in the Book of Job in chapter 41 in a description of Leviathan:

1 “Can you draw out Leviathan with a
fishhook or press down his tongue with
a cord?
2 Can you put a rope in his nose
or pierce his jaw with a hook?

3 Will he make many pleas to you?
Will he speak to you soft words?
4 Will he make a covenant with you
to take him for your servant forever?

5 Will you play with him as with a bird,
or will you put him on a leash for your
girls?
6 Will traders bargain over him?
Will they divide him up among the
merchants?
7 Can you fill his skin with harpoons
or his head with fishing spears?

8 Lay your hands on him;
remember the battle—you will not do it
again!
9 Behold, the hope of a man is false;
he is laid low even at the sight of him.

10 No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him
up.
Who then is he who can stand before me?
11 Who has first given to me, that I should
repay him?
Whatever is under the whole heaven is
mine.

12 “I will not keep silence concerning his
limbs,
or his mighty strength, or his goodly
frame.
13 Who can strip off his outer garment?
Who would come near him with a bridle?

14 Who can open the doors of his face?
Around his teeth is terror.
15 His back is made of rows of shields,
shut up closely as with a seal.

16 One is so near to another
that no air can come between them.
17 They are joined one to another;
they clasp each other and cannot be
separated.

18 His sneezings flash forth light,
and his eyes are like the eyelids of the
dawn.
19 Out of his mouth go flaming torches;
sparks of fire leap forth.

20 Out of his nostrils comes forth smoke,
as from a boiling pot and burning rushes.
21 His breath kindles coals,
and a flame comes forth from his mouth.

22 In his neck abides strength,
and terror dances before him.
23 The folds of his flesh stick together,
firmly cast on him and immovable.
24 His heart is hard as a stone,
hard as the lower millstone.

25 When he raises himself up, the mighty are
afraid;
at the crashing they are beside themselves.
26 Though the sword reaches him, it does not
avail,
nor the spear, the dart, or the javelin.

27 He counts iron as straw,
and bronze as rotten wood.
28 The arrow cannot make him flee;
for him, sling stones are turned to stubble.

29 Clubs are counted as stubble;
he laughs at the rattle of javelins.
30 His underparts are like sharp potsherds;
he spreads himself like a threshing sledge
on the mire.

31 He makes the deep boil like a pot;
he makes the sea like a pot of ointment.
32 Behind him he leaves a shining wake;
one would think the deep to be white-
haired.

33 On earth there is not his like,
a creature without fear.
34 He sees everything that is high;
he is king over all the sons of pride.^[1]”

The reference to fishhooks, harpoons, and merchants indicates a creature of the sea. Leviathan is so fierce that even the sight of him lays a man low. The back of Leviathan is thick scales, "a row of shields, shut up closely as with a seal" and the creature breathes fire, his "sneezings flash forth light" and "out of his mouth go flaming torches, sparks of fire leap forth" causing the water to boil. Iron cannot prevail against him, neither arrows nor clubs. Leviathan is a creature that no man can withstand or prevail against.

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The last verse in the chapter indicates that the Lord is not simply talking about a scary animal in the sea, but that the passage also references the cultural powers of Job’s day. Leviathan is said to “see everything that is high” and that “he is king over all the sons of pride.” What does a sea creature see that is “on high,” and who are these “sons of pride?” If the writer of Job were only referring to a creature in the sea, the limits of Leviathan’s power would be the limits of the sea, and the deep of the sea is not “on high.” However, the belief about a powerful sea dragon does not originate with the book of Job but is drawn from the cosmology of the culture within which the writer lived. The ancient Mesopotamian culture did not believe in a sole, all-powerful God who created ex-nihilo, but a pantheon and the Akkadian goddess Tiamat, the goddess of the sea and of chaos.^[2] Tiamat of the sea and Abzu of fresh water joined to produce all other gods, the “sons of pride.^[3]” As Brian Godawa notes in an essay on Biblical creation and storytelling,

Another way that biblical creation reflects ancient Near Eastern culture, while subverting it, is in its appropriation of what ANE scholars call the Chaoskampf motif, or the creation of order out of chaos through struggle. Hermann Gunkel first suggested in Creation and Chaos (1895) that some ancient Near Eastern creation myths contained a cosmic conflict between deity and sea, as well as sea dragons or serpents that expressed the creation of order out of chaos. Gunkel argued that Genesis borrowed this idea from the Babylonian tale of Marduk battling the goddess Tiamat, serpent of chaos, whom he vanquished, and out of whose body he created the heavens and earth. Later, John Day argued in light of the discovery of the Ugarit tablets in 1928, that Canaan, not Babylonia is the source of the combat motif in Genesis, reflected in Yahweh’s own complaint that Israel had become polluted by Canaanite culture. In the Baal cycle, Baal battles Yam (Sea) and conquers it, along with “the dragon,” “the twisting serpent,” to be enthroned as chief deity of the Canaanite pantheon.^[4]

In light of the ancient Mesopotamian religion, the claim that Yahweh separated the waters in Genesis 1:6-7, setting the bounds of both the heavens and the earth, is more than an origin story, it is a call to war, a statement and a challenge that the Great I AM is over and will remain over all other beings who would challenge him. In Job 41 as well, God highlights not only the fear mortals experience when they face the physical creature, but also grounds the reference of the spiritual powers of Ephesians 6:12.^[5]

Job’s Journey

The story of the man named Job is one of a person who was living an ordered and orderly life when calamity hit. Job was righteous. He did what he was supposed to do, he treated people as he should, and he worshiped God, but then chaos overtook his life. He lost it all: all his children, all his possessions, all his friends, and all his influence. He lost his health and his peace. It would seem that his devotion to Yahweh was of no use. It seemed that chaos had won.

When we first hear from Job in chapter 3, he is in the dark night of the soul. Job is certain that all is at an end and that there is nothing left for him other than to lay down, die, and hope that God will vindicate him in the resurrection, because the powers of evil seem to have won this round. Job may have stayed in this state of despair if not for the agitation and irritation by his well-meaning friends who are absolutely certain they know the reason Job has experienced loss. In rising to respond to the accusations of his friends, Job not only insists on his own standing but calls on God himself to vindicate him. That because God is just, he will not allow the injustice done to Job stand. Everyone else has turned against him, so with nothing left to do, Job calls upon the Lord:

23 “Oh that my words were written!
Oh that they were inscribed in a book!

24 Oh that with an iron pen and lead
they were engraved in the rock forever!

25 For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and at the last he will stand upon the
earth.

26 And after my skin has been thus
destroyed,
yet in my flesh I shall see God,

27 whom I shall see for myself,
and my eyes shall behold, and not
another.

My heart faints within me!^[6]

Job puts his trust in his Redeemer who has the power to resurrect and restore even the dead. The power of chaos and death will not prevail.

Leviathan’s Role in the Book of Job

When Job stands upon and declares this truth and his absolute trust in God as the good and just power of all, the landscape begins to shift. Job no longer argues with his friends about who is right. After all, even if Job won the argument, how would that fix the problem? Job instead looks to God alone and directly for both a response and deliverance. In chapters 26-31, Job presents his case to God and challenges God to explain himself.

Job is asking God to explain the question that all humanity has been asking since the beginning of time, “Why does a good God allow evil?” After Job’s exchange with Elihu who tells Job he is getting a little full of himself thinking that his righteousness is higher than God’s, God himself answers Job in chapters 38-41. Drawing Job’s attention to the magnificence and the mysteries of creation, things that Job sees and interacts with on a daily basis, God asks Job if he understands how all of these things came about. Then God moves on from every-day, non-threatening things like the ox and the ostrich to creatures of power like Leviathan and Behemoth. God gets serious, saying:

7 “Dress for action like a man;
I will question you, and you make it known
to me.

8 Will you even put me in the wrong?
Will you condemn me that you may be in
the right?^[7]

“Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?” In other words, God is asking Job, “Are you willing to be wrong?” Job has considered himself a God-fearing and righteous person, but when it comes down to it, does he value his own reputation above God’s? Is he willing to admit that he is wrong, or more precisely in the case of Job, that what has come about in his life is in line with the order of God’s laws, and therefore his justice and righteousness, even if Job does not understand the reasons why?

The essence of God’s being is justice, and the world that he created runs upon it. He cannot be other than he is. All of us do things that violate God’s justice and order, and we can only call upon him for mercy. The point of God’s response to Job is that there are all these things in the world around him, including Leviathan, that Job cannot explain or control; how can Job even begin to understand the spiritual forces that govern the world?

In the case of Job, was it really about the answer to “why” all those things happened, or was it more about Job wanting to be right? Between Job and his friends, Job was the only one who wanted to seek out God. But between Job and Elihu, Elihu was the one defending God’s name rather than his own. Do you really want to know why, or do you just want to be right? Put another way, are you willing to be wrong? When fighting a spiritual battle, we have to be willing to humble ourselves before God in order to stand firm.

We see in the first chapters of Job that the chaos that entered Job’s life was caused by spiritual forces he wasn’t aware of. As Juliana Claasens points out in a discussion on the dialogue in Job, "The divine speeches assert that chaos is part of the cosmos, and what is more, God is involved in this chaos."^[8] That there is chaos does not mean God is not working. At times, he uses the chaos to bring about his plan. From the details gathered in the Book of Job, Job was righteous, but he was also comfortable. He had lived an entirely blessed life up until the time when disaster struck. As iron is forged with fire, so are characters molded and spirits refined through adversity. Job himself recognized this in chapter 23 when he states that once God has tested him, he will be refined as gold.^[9] The refining itself is not the end goal, it is that the refining allows us to be in closer communion with God and to hold greater glory, a greater fullness of his presence. As exemplary as Job was before his trials, it was not until he was brought down to a point where he had nothing left that he held out his hand to the only one who could help.

Facing the Dragon

We are not given a lot of description about Job’s personality and character prior to his trial other than he feared God and performed righteous actions. We do not know if he helped the poor and defended the widow from a true heart of compassion or if it was from a sense of obligation. We do not know if he truly saw the blessed life he lived as the gracious gift of God or if he saw it as his just reward that he deserved. Considering he only had three friends who came to comfort him and those seem to have come from a distance, it is likely the latter. We do not know the hidden faults that Job might have had, and he likely did not either because he had never been in a place where he had to face the dragon within himself. It was not until he was brought low and rendered powerless, when he was stripped of everything except for the essence of who he was that he called to God for deliverance.

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Leviathan in the book of Job is a symbol and a sign to the reader that regardless of the fear you face or the spiritual battle you are engaged in, God is in the one in whom you are to put your trust, and he is the one who will triumph in the end. Leviathan, the dragon, is used throughout the Bible to inspire victorious hope, as John Day notes

Although the Hebrews did not borrow the theology of Canaan, they did borrow its imagery — here the imagery of Baal's enemy, Sea/Dragon/Leviathan. As the progress of Scripture unfolds, this Leviathan, now Yahweh's enemy, is used to portray (a) Yahweh's victory over the power of Chaos at Creation; (b) Yahweh's victory over the power of Egypt at the Exodus and over the power of Babylon at the "exodus" from the Exile; and (c) ultimately, as Isaiah 27:1 illustrates, to portray Yahweh's victory over the power of Satan at the eschaton on the analogy that "as the beginning, so also the end."^[10]

What is Your Dragon?

What is the mountain in your life you think you cannot be moved or the dragon you think cannot be slain? Whatever the problem, God is powerful and Lord over all. Just as in the end Job was restored to a greater abundance than he had before, when life is devastated by dragon fire, he brings beauty from the ashes.

First published in An Unexpected Journal: Dragons (2022).

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Fables vs Parables

Aesop was a Greek slave from Samos who lived in the sixth century before Christ.^[2] He is known as the author of a wide range of fables, but as British author G.K. Chesterton, who wrote an introduction to a collection of Aesop’s fables, noted, it is more likely that Aesop himself was a collector of these tales, such as the Brothers Grimm who later collected fairy tales, rather than the originator of the stories himself.^[3] Regardless of the origins of the stories that Aesop told, there is no question that he told them in a way that these tales became his own.

A fable is a short story that illustrates a truth, a virtue, or an object lesson in some way. The other distinguishing characteristic of this type of story is that a fable involves animals. A human being may play a role in the fable, as we will see in “The Fisherman Piping,” but the fable centers around the animal. The defining characteristic of the animal in the story is key to the object lesson. For example, in Aesop’s fable, “The Crab and His Mother,” the sideways skittering of the crab makes the point.

An Old Crab said to her son, "Why do you walk sideways like that, my son? You ought to walk straight." The Young Crab replied, "Show me how, dear mother, and I'll follow your example." The Old Crab tried, but tried in vain, and then saw how foolish she had been to find fault with her child.

Example is better than precept.^[4]

In this short sketch, Aesop highlights that as we might say today, a person cannot “rise above their raising” unless they are shown how it is done.

In contrast, a parable is also a short story with an object lesson, but while both forms are about objective truth, the fable is impersonal and dispassionate while the parable, even when using an inanimate object as an illustration, goes to the heart of the connection of God and man. As Chesterton observed, Aesop understood that

[In a fable,] all the persons must be impersonal. They must be like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess. The lion must always be stronger than the wolf, just as four is always double of two. The fox in a fable must move crooked, as the knight in chess must move crooked. The sheep in a fable must march on, as the pawn in chess must march on. The fable must not allow for the crooked captures of the pawn; it must not allow for what Balzac called "the revolt of a sheep."^[5]

In contrast, Jesus’s parables are not just about truth but about showing the way of salvation. The parables recorded in Matthew’s Gospel are often introduced with the phrase “the kingdom of heaven is like . . .” Some of Jesus’s parables do have fabulist features, for example, in the parables about the sheep and the shepherd, and the wolves among the sheep; the sheep are the faithful who follow the master and the wolves are understood to be ravenous and destructive. It would make no sense at all to use a dog or a goat in the role of the wolfish believers who should be sheep but aren’t.

Another difference between Aesop’s fables and Jesus’s parables is that the first are observations of what is while the latter are more myth, and as a result, an image of not only what could be but ultimately what will be.^[6] For example, Aesop’s “The Wolf and the Lamb” is a commentary on the rich and powerful justifying their oppression and exploitation of the weak.

A Wolf came upon a Lamb straying from the flock, and felt some compunction about taking the life of so helpless a creature without some plausible excuse; so he cast about for a grievance and said at last,

"Last year, sirrah, you grossly insulted me."

"That is impossible, sir," bleated the Lamb, "for I wasn't born then."

"Well," retorted the Wolf, "you feed in my pastures."

"That cannot be," replied the Lamb, "for I have never yet tasted grass."

"You drink from my spring, then," continued the Wolf.

"Indeed, sir," said the poor Lamb, "I have never yet drunk anything but my mother's milk."

"Well, anyhow," said the Wolf, "I'm not going without my dinner": and he sprang upon the Lamb and devoured it without more ado.^[7]

There is no conviction in the story, no redemption or justice for the lamb. It is simply an observation of the way of the world . . . a wolf’s got to do what a wolf’s got to do. Edward Clayton commenting on Aesop’s fables notes that the powerful doing as they will is a common theme among the fables

. . . collectively they seem to convey clearly the lesson that the strong rule and the weak must obey or suffer, and that ultimately it is strength that matters more than anything else. The weak risk defiance or opposition at their own peril, and no matter how well they might argue or how beautifully they might sing, their lack of power means that they ultimately have very little chance of successfully resisting a stronger adversary—and in the fables strength almost always means physical power.^[8]

In contrast, the parables of Jesus set a standard, give a word of warning, and promise a day of judgment. While Aesop’s fables may point out flaws and failings, they leave the reader where they are. Jesus’s parables provoke a response and prompt action. Jesus gives a warning to those in authority who misuse their position in the Parable of the Unjust Steward.^[9] Those who mistreat the poor and needy are promised eternal judgment in the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, and he speaks to all who turn a blind eye to the needs and welfare of others in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.^[10] Jesus’s thoughts are not ideas or abstractions. They are not impersonal stories with truth shielded in impersonal portrayals by anthropomorphic animals. Samaritans were a people Jews collectively reviled.^[11] The tax collectors and religious leaders very often misused their positions to exploit those they had in their charge.^[12] More to the point, the man with five brothers who called out to Lazarus from Hell is believed to represent Caiaphas, son-in-law of Annas who had a racket in their control of the Temple sacrificial system.^[13] Jesus got personal.

Jesus’s parables give an answer to Cain’s question in Genesis 4:9 “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Yes, you are. Society may be broken and people cruel, but in the end all will be called to account and there will be justice. Jesus’s stories are not just about abstract truth, but Truth Incarnate, about restoring the man to the One whom he images as well as fellowship with his fellow imagers. As C.S. Lewis points out in his essay, “Myth Made Fact,” “truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is.”^[14] Aesop’s fables are about truth. Jesus’s parables are about reality.

Imagination Precedes Reason

Aesop the storyteller preceded Socrates, who was considered one of the most influential philosophers of all time. Aesop’s fables presented truth and a standard of virtue outside of human influence or agency. However, as Christos Zafiropoulos notes in a comparison of Socrates and Aesop, “Aesop is no philosopher. He has no theory, no teaching or method, no propositions to offer to his audience on what the good life consists of. He does not seek to improve his listeners and lead them to the philosophical life or to any higher truth.”^[15] In Aesop’s fables, he highlights the corrupt and the weak, but he does not offer, or even imagine, any solution to human failings. People just are who they are. What is unique about Aesop’s fables is that rather than presenting the powerful as a different sort of people that operate by their own set of rules, Aesop holds them to the same standard as everyone else. The powerful do not set the rules nor are they exempt from them; there is one objective truth -- what Lewis refers to as the “Tao” and which James tells us is a unitary whole -- and all are subject to it.^[16] This idea of transcendent truth moved from illustration in Aesop’s fables to Plato’s theory of Forms mediated through Plato’s account of Socrates’s dialogue in Phaedo where Socrates spends his final imprisonment putting Aesop’s fables to verse in honor of Apollo.^[17] Socrates’s Apology had failed to save him from an unjust judgment, so he is spending the end of his life focusing on beauty and imaginative verse.^[18]

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The idea of truth and virtue outside of human decree, these absolute Forms, can be seen in Aesop’s fables illustrating truth. Aesop’s stories illustrate what he believed: that oppression exists and there was no hope of life being otherwise. However, when the thing is identified, that idea continues to be explored. Plato did not accept the idea of injustice, but reasoned that

Justice is . . . at once a part of human virtue and the bond, which joins man together in society. It is the identical quality that makes good and social. Justice is an order and duty of the parts of the soul, it is to the soul as health is to the body. Plato says [it] is not mere strength, but it is a harmonious strength. Justice is not the right of the stronger but the effective harmony of the whole. All moral conceptions revolve about the good of the whole-individual as well as social.^[19]

Virtue as a desired and necessary part of human life, both individually and as a society, continued in the work of later philosophers, such as Aristotle who believed that “blessedness,” the fulfillment of human life was not grounded in power or wealth, but in thinking and doing rightly.^[20]

As Chesterton notes, Aesop handed down in a viral way the “plainest truths,” the “tremendous truths that are called truisms.”^[21] These truisms were later developed and incorporated into the framework of Greco-Roman values and society. However, truth and knowledge alone do not provide a solution. Plato did not think a truly virtuous life was possible for embodied humans. Aristotle believed it was possible for only a very few. It was not until the advent of a Jewish storyteller that turned Plato’s Forms and Aesop’s fables on their heads that an example and a way appeared.

Jew vs Greek

The accounts of Jesus’s life in the Gospels and the recording of his teachings are peppered with parables. In fact, Matthew wrote that Jesus “never spoke to them without using such parables.”^[22] Teaching truth through illustration has a long history throughout the Old Testament; however, Jesus’s method of using his parables is distinctive in the Hebrew form of allegorical stories called mashal.^[23]

Mashal can be defined, according to David B. Gowler, in regards to the Old Testament as ”whatever is ‘proverb-like,’ with hidden or allusive truth, which means that the response of the reader or hearer is essential to the process of creating understanding.”^[24] Jesus’s parables were very Hebraic in the way that they require a response on the part of the hearer, as opposed to Aesop’s which are simply observational. However, as Gowler also notes, that while Jesus’s parables can be considered a subset of the earlier examples, the meshalim of the Old Testament with its symbolic illustrations do not approach the narrative parables that Jesus used.

While the gloss may be Hebraic, the foundational form has more in common with the Greek fables of Aesop. In fact, Jesus incorporates Aesop’s stories in a number of his parables. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus draws directly from one of Aesop’s fables to make his own point. The phrase, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” comes from Aesop’s fable of the same name.

A Wolf resolved to disguise himself in order that he might prey upon a flock of sheep without fear of detection. So he clothed himself in a sheepskin, and slipped among the sheep when they were out at pasture. He completely deceived the shepherd, and when the flock was penned for the night he was shut in with the rest. But that very night as it happened, the shepherd, requiring a supply of mutton for the table, laid hands on the Wolf in mistake for a Sheep, and killed him with his knife on the spot.^[25]

The wolf is sly and sneaks in where he does not belong, with the intent to destroy the sheep. The shepherd is fooled, but unwittingly kills the interloper in spite of the wolf’s deviousness. The shepherd prevails, but through luck alone. In a series of warnings in Matthew 7, Jesus uses the imagery of Aesop’s fable to warn his followers of deceivers who will come, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”^[26] However, unlike the bemused shepherd in Aesop’s tale, those wolves can be identified “by their fruits.”^[27]

That the influence of Greek stories found their way into Jesus’s parables should not come as a surprise. After all, Jesus was a Jewish man born to a people who had been under Greek rule for over two hundred years.^[28] Even though the land of his people was then under the power of the Roman Empire during his lifetime, the Hellenistic influence was so strong that Koine Greek was the common language of communication, the Greek Septuagint was widely read and frequently quoted by New Testament authors, and philosophy of the Greeks was so predominant that John opens his Gospel with a reframing of Philo’s idea of the logos as Christ himself as its Incarnation.

Even in the turning of a fable to a particular purpose, Jesus followed a long tradition. Jesus as God may be beyond time, but as man, he was a man of his time and fully immersed in his culture. Without an understanding of these cultural references, often the point of his parables can be missed. For example, The Parable of the Dragnet is a retelling of Aesop’s fable “The Fisherman Piping.”

A Fisherman who could play the flute went down one day to the sea-shore with his nets and his flute; and, taking his stand on a projecting rock, began to play a tune, thinking that the music would bring the fish jumping out of the sea. He went on playing for some time, but not a fish appeared: so at last he threw down his flute and cast his net into the sea, and made a great haul of fish. When they were landed and he saw them leaping about on the shore, he cried, "You rascals! you wouldn't dance when I piped: but now I've stopped, you can do nothing else!"^[29]

However, it is not just Aesop’s fable that Jesus draws on in his own parable, but the use of the same fable by Cyrus the Younger. In The History of Herodotus, we are told

The Ionians and Aiolians, as soon as the Lydians had been subdued by the Persians, sent messengers to Cyrus at Sardis, desiring to be his subjects on the same terms as they had been subjects of Croesus. And when he heard that which they proposed to him, he spoke to them a fable, saying that a certain player on the pipe saw fishes in the sea and played on his pipe, supposing that they would come out to land; but being deceived in his expectation, he took a casting-net and enclosed a great multitude of the fishes and drew them forth from the water: and when he saw them leaping about, he said to the fishes: "Stop dancing I pray you now, seeing that ye would not come out and dance before when I piped." Cyrus spoke this fable to the Ionians and Aiolians for this reason, because the Ionians had refused to comply before, when Cyrus himself by a messenger requested them to revolt from Croesus, while now when the conquest had been made they were ready to submit to Cyrus. Thus he said to them in anger, and the Ionians, when they heard this answer brought back to their cities, put walls round about them severally, and gathered together to the Panionion, all except the men of Miletos, for with these alone Cyrus had sworn an agreement on the same terms as the Lydians had granted. The rest of the Ionians resolved by common consent to send messengers to Sparta, to ask the Spartans to help the Ionians.^[30]

It is this political application that provides the key to understanding Jesus’s Parable of the Dragnet.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind:

Which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away.

So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just,

And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.^[31]

Aesop’s fable and the acts of Cyrus represent an illustration and an actuality of persuasion, the ability to choose freely, but in the end all will come. The choice determines if the coming will end in joy or grief. This is the message of the kingdom of heaven. In the parables preceding the Parable of the Dragnet in Matthew 13, Jesus illustrates the great lengths God goes to bring all into the kingdom. In the Parable of the Growing Seed, the message of the Gospel is spread far and wide, but not everyone will receive it. In the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, Jesus warns that some who posture as believers aren’t true followers, but that they will be sorted out in the end. The Parable of the Mustard Seed is an illustration that the kingdom of God is not like the kingdom of the world and those who seem insignificant in the natural world are the greatest in the spiritual. The Parable of the Yeast illustrates that a little bit can affect the whole. The Parable of the Pearl of Great Price is an illustration of how very precious the individual is to God that he will go to great lengths to redeem us, and the Parable of the Hidden Treasure reminds the Jews that though they are God’s “treasured nation,” there is also a “hidden treasure,” the people that were not formerly called his own that he is seeking out.

Matthew ends his series of parables about the kingdom of heaven with the Parable of the Dragnet as a word of warning, followed by an account of Jesus’s rejection by the people at Nazareth. He is calling, playing to the music of our hearts. Will you choose to come?

Jesus vs Aesop

Both Aesop and Jesus were skilled and influential storytellers. Both were believed to be inspired by the gods/God. Both men shaped the imagination of the people of their time, shifted views, and changed culture for generations following.

However, a story is just a story unless it illustrates a truth that proofs. While Aesop highlighted the flaws and missteps of the society around him clearly, presenting the idea that truth and virtue are the same for all rather than a different set of standards for some, he offered no solution and no hope for change. In fact, when his own circumstances changed, he acted in the same way of those that he had condemned while a slave.^[32] This is why the truth of his stories have remained, but his impact as a person is largely forgotten.

In contrast, Jesus not only told stories that were truth, he was truth in action. He not only lived a life of example that his followers could pattern themselves after, but provided a remedy for the brokenness Aesop bemoaned. As C.S. Lewis reminds us in “The Grand Miracle,”

A man really ought to say, “The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago in the same spirit in which he says, ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’ Because we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. There is, of course, this difference, that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not. We can. We have the power of either withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on into those ‘high mid-summer pomps’ in which our Leader, the Son of man, already dwells, and to which He is calling us. It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.^[33]

Be the fish that comes to the song your Savior sings.

First published in An Unexpected Journal: The Ancients (2021).

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Pearl is a medieval poem believed to have been written around A.D. 1400, part of the ‘Alliterative Revival’, by the same author who wrote Gawain and the Green Knight as well as the poems Purity and Patience.^{[1] [2]} While opinions vary, the popular position is that the poem was written as an elegy upon the death of the author’s daughter.^[3] While some scholars argue that the poem was written purely as “medieval vision-literature” representing “clean maidenhood,” Tolkien reminds us that “we are dealing with a period when men, aware of the vagaries of dreams, still thought that amid their japes came visions of truth” and that

. . . they thought that on occasion, as God willed, to some that slept blessed faces appeared and prophetic voices spoke. To them it might not seem so incredible that the dream of a poet, one wounded with a great bereavement and troubled in spirit, might resemble the vision in Pearl.^[4]

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The author of Pearl struggles with accepting the death of his child.^[5] Today, we might go to a self-help group and discuss which of the five stages of grief we are in. In medieval times, life expectancy was short and death ever present. Sessions of sharing one's grief would have seemed self-indulgent and strange. Instead of discussing his grief with others, the author of Pearl pours out his pain in a poem that tells the story of his battle with overwhelming grief and loss and as well a message of redemption.

Pearl begins with the writer remembering his daughter and how dear she was to him. Like Pam in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, his child was the focal point of his life.^[6] Pearl was young when she died and in his memory of her, he has created an image of perfection, one that leaves out the realities of life, the infractions, and the disappointments. His love is very real, but he has begun to rewrite the story and build a shrine in his memory to which the living would never be able to measure up.

Her only alone I deemed as dear,

Alas! I lost her in garden near:

Through grass to the ground from me it shot:

I pine now oppressed by love-wound drear

For that pearl, mine own, without a spot.^[7]

He is in danger of becoming lost in bitterness and entirely focused on the past. He recognizes that he is staying too long in his grief and he should begin to move towards healing; however, he resists. As painful as the loss of a loved one is, sometimes there is a perverse pleasure in holding on to the pain.

Since in that spot it sped from me,

I have looked and longed for that precious thing

That me once wont from woe to free

To uplift my lot and healing bring

But my heart doth hurt now cruelly,

My breast with burning torment sting.^[8]

He continues to reason with himself, recognizing that everything must change, everything must die, and that new life comes from the ashes of the old. He begins to consider that as precious as his daughter is, there could not fail to be fruit from her life and death even though she died so young. It is with these thoughts going through his mind that he falls asleep and enters a vision.

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Recognizing that things must change and life comes from death

For all grass must grow from grains that are dead.

No wheat would else to barn be won.

From good all good is ever begun,

And fail so fair a see could not,

So that sprang and sprouted spices none

From that precious pearl without a spot.[9]

In his vision, his daughter appears to him. He is delighted to see her; however, she reproaches him for his grief that he has been wallowing in. She points out that he should know that she is in heaven and that, instead of continuing to grieve with a focus on self-pity, he should be happy for her. She is where there is peace, joy, and no pain and suffering.

‘Good sir, you have your speech mis-spent

To say your pearl is all away

That is in chest so choicely pent,

Even in this gracious garden gay,

Here always to linger and to play

Where regret nor grief e’er trouble her.

“Here is a casket safe” you would say,

If you were a gentle jeweller.^[10]

Even at these words, he resists comfort. Sometimes we get so used to a certain pattern of thinking and so comfortable in a set of emotions that we hold on and resist letting them go, even if it means we are miserable. His daughter confronts him about this.

And yet you have called your fate a thief

That of naught to aught hath fashioned her,

You grudge the healing of your grief

You are no grateful jeweller.^[11]

At this point, the writer desires to move from one artificial reality to another. After seeing his daughter in the vision, he tells her that he wants to stay there with her. She replies that it is not possible and that what he is seeing now is just a vision; it is not truly heaven. What we see and experience can be deceptive. We have to be cautious about what we put our faith in. Without the context of how our lives fit into the bigger picture of the world around us and God’s plan as a whole, our perception can become distorted. We cannot see clearly even what we think we know.

You know not on earth what one doth mean;

Your words from your wits escaping flee;

You believe I live here on this green,

Because you can with eyes me see;

Again, you will in this land with me

Here dwell yourself, you now aver;

And thirdly, pass this water free;

That may no joyful jeweller.^[12]

His daughter encourages him to put his faith in God’s word over any feelings, circumstances, or experiences. What we see can sometimes be what we want to see rather than what is.

I hold that jeweller worth little praise

Who well esteems what he sees with eye,

And much to blame his graceless ways

Who believes our Lord would speak a lie.

He promised faithfully your lives to raise

Though fate decreed your flesh should die;

His words as nonsense ye appraise

Who approve of naught not seen with eye.^[13]

In times of distress, it is easy to feel sorry for oneself, but his daughter encourages him, as Paul did the Thessalonians, to give thanks to God in all circumstances.^[14] The cross that we bear may not be one of a martyr.^[15] It may be our cross is to bear up in difficult circumstances such as the loss of a child, financial difficulties, or being maligned by friends and still thank God for his goodness and trust in his faithfulness.

Thank God in all circumstances

‘But of woe, I deem, and deep distress

You speak’, she said. ‘Why do you so?

Through loud lament when they lose the less

Oft many men the more forgo

‘Twere better with cross yourself to bless,

Every praising God in weal and woe;

For resentment gains you not a cress;

Who must needs endure, he may not say no!

For though you dance as any doe,

Rampant bray or raging scream,

When escape you cannot, to nor fro,

His doom you must abide, I deem.^[16]

At this point, he recognizes that he has sinned against God in his bitterness and resentment. He realizes that he has put his daughter in a higher place in his heart than God. He confesses his sin and asks God for mercy.

‘May I give no grievance to my Lord,

Rash fool, though blundering tale I tell.

My heart the pain of loss outpoured,

Gushing as water springs from well.

I commit me ever to His mercy’s ward.

Rebuke me not with words so fell,

Though I erring stray, my dear adored!

But your comfort kindly to me accord,

In pity bethinking you of this:

For partner you did me pain award

On whom was founded all my bliss.^[17]

This stanza of the poem parallels Psalm 51, which was composed under very similar circumstances. It was written after the death of David’s son with Bathsheba, which was a judgment from God for David’s adulterous and murderous affair. While there is no indication that the death of the daughter in Pearl was due to any sort of sin on the part of her father, David and the poet are similar in the intensity of their grief. David was so distraught during his child’s illness that his servants hesitated in telling David of his death for fear of what he might do.^[18] However, unlike the poet who was stuck in the mire of his grief, David got up, worshiped God, and wrote the 51st Psalm. It may have taken the Pearl poet a little longer to get to seeking God, but once he arrived at the point of repentance, his words echoed David’s. Like David, he asked God to wash him of his sins.

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness–

According to the multitude of Your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.

Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight—

That You may be found just when You speak, and blameless when You judge.^[19]

Up until this point in the poem, the writer has described his feelings about the loss of his daughter. Someone who has experienced the same thing would identify with his struggle as he chronicles his journey from despair and confusion to joy at seeing his daughter again. His dialogue with Pearl is a gentle prompt to a reader in similar circumstances to look up and see the truth of the situation. If someone has faith in the salvation of Christ, there is hope and true confidence that death is not the end. If we believe that, the only grief we can have is for ourselves and dwelling in what becomes a form of self-indulgent self-pity. Once the father comes to repentance and turns his focus on the goodness of God, the poem also shifts. He recognizes that his daughter’s state of being as eternal “queen in bliss” is a cause for joy, not sorrow.^[20]

Why did the writer feel the need to include this reminder in a work where the focal point is on eternal life in Christ? We may know verses and doctrine; however, they do not become something that we truly “know” and have a deeper understanding of until we have come to a point in our lives where we have to stand on that truth. Once the father comes out of the spiral of misery to a place of repentance and focuses on the goodness of God, these lessons serve as a reminder of what those words really mean and that they apply to the situation he is currently facing. He is in a position for those seeds to take root in his life.

Next the author paints a picture of Christ as a heroic warrior who won the victory on the cross. It is central to the poem. Everything prior to it looks forward in hope because of the price Jesus paid. Everything after it looks back to that battle where Christ won his right to claim those who believe in him and to his future Millennial reign. The primary message of these stanzas is that we are blood bought. "The innocent is ever saved by right."^[21]

Earlier in the poem, the writer used Jesus’s parable of the field owner and the laborers to reinforce the point that salvation is through faith and not works. ^[22] He revisits this same theme again by highlighting Jesus’s love for children and his statement that one must become like a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. ^{[23] [24]} Why this repeat? Once again, knowledge of a doctrine does not equal belief. In order to leave no room for seeds of doubt to creep in about whether or not a lost child would enter Heaven, the writer strongly emphasizes Jesus’s unequivocal assurance on that fact.

Jesus’s love for the children

Let him that can rightly read in lore,

Look in the Book and learn thereby

How Jesus walked the world of yore,

And people pressed their babes Him nigh,

For joy and health from Him did pour.

“Our children touch!” they humbly cry.

“Let be!” his disciples rebuked them sore,

And to many would approach deny.

Then Jesus sweetly did reply;

“Nay! Let children by me alight;

For such is heaven prepared on high!”

The innocent ever is saved by right.^[25]

Many writers have written on loss, grief, death, and dying. Many have expounded on God’s will and trusting in his goodness when accepting loss. However, the author of Pearl is unique in that in giving a reason for the death of his child, he skips over the possible ramifications in this world and looks forward to the next. Stanzas 62 and 63 describe how God’s grace and redemption are ultimately beyond our understanding. However, God has given us glimpses and pieces of that plan. Paul talked about this plan in his letter to the Ephesians:

God has now revealed to us his mysterious plan regarding Christ, a plan to fulfill his own good pleasure. And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan.^[26]

This is the plan the writer of Pearl describes in the final third of the poem. He highlights the reality that, for each of us in Christ, our lives are so much more than this short time on earth. Complaining that our time in this life was limited is like complaining that we only had to wait a few minutes in a theatre foyer before being taken straight in to see the play. The purpose of all this is to build the host that will return with Christ in his Second Coming.

Thus every soul that no soil did gain

His comely wife doth the Lamb declare;

Though each day he a host obtain,

No grudge nor grievance do we bear,

But for each one five we wish there were,

The more the merrier, so God me bless!

Our love doth thrive where many fare

In honour more and never less.^[27]

He expounds on the New Jerusalem, explaining that the current earthly Jerusalem was the place of Christ's suffering while the New Jerusalem is the place of peace.

There are two spots, To speak of these:

They both the name “Jerusalem” share;

“The City of God” or Sight of Peace”,

These meanings only doth that bear.

In the first it once the Lamb did please

Our peace by His suffering to repair;

In the other naught is found but peace

That shall last for ever without impair.

To that high city we swiftly fare

As soon as our flesh is laid to rot;

Ever grow shall the bliss and glory there

For the host within that hath no spot.^[28]

It is this Jerusalem, the place of peace, where Isaiah prophesied that the wolf would lie down with the lamb.^[29] It is this Jerusalem believers are looking forward to when they pray as Psalm 122:6 instructs, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. May those who love you be secure.”

After reflecting on God’s glory in the New Jerusalem, it is time for him to be separated from his daughter and return to the land of the living. He now realizes that his focus should be on Christ alone and that he will wait on God’s timing to be reunited with his daughter.

But as wild in the water to start I strained,

On my intent did quaking seize;

From that aim recalled I was detained:

It was not as my Prince did please.^[30]

His renewed sense of purpose and a commitment to follow God’s will is evident:

How dear was all that you said to me,

That vision true while I did share.

If it be true and sooth to sear

That in garland gay you are set at ease,

Then happy I, though chained in care,

That you that Prince indeed do please.^[31]

Very often value tales explicitly state or imply a “happily ever after.” This promise of the “good ending,” what Tolkien refers to the ‘eucastrophe’ or the sudden, joyous and unexpected ending, is so ingrained in our DNA that we expect to see that hope fulfilled.^[32] As Augustine of Hippo notes in his own work on the eternal city, City of God,

We do not know why young men in perfect health are robbers, or why infants, who could not hurt anyone, even by a word, are afflicted by all sorts of dreadful diseases. We do not know why a person who contributes usefully to human affairs is snatched away by premature death, or why someone who, to our eyes, ought never to have been born lives on beyond all expectation.^[33]

Augustine reminds his readers that “divine teaching works to our good.”^[34] That Ultimate Good, and the good that works for all who love God, will be made evident in the Day of the Lord.^{[35] [36]} Until then, we may not see that good clearly, but Augustine assures us that “what is hidden is righteous.”^[37]

This is the realization of the father in Pearl. He has come through a journey. He has seen the error of his ways and repented. He has committed to keeping his eyes on Christ, but he still falls into sorrow again.

But with fortune no man is content

That rightly he may claim and bear;

So robed of realms immortally fair

Too soon my joy did sorrow seize.

Lord! Mad are they who against thee dare

Or purpose what Thee may displease!^[38]

But this time rather than staying in the pit, he gets up and goes on again. He recognizes God’s grace in allowing him to have that vision and submits himself to Christ to make him a “pearl without spot.”^[39]

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When someone experiences the loss of a loved one, sometimes it is hard to know what to say. Like Job’s friends who did not speak for the first seven days they were with him, sometimes it is better to say nothing at all.^[40] There are no words that will comfort. But there comes a time when grief can become a pit if a person stays in that mindset. As a friend, how do you tell someone it is time to move forward?

Sometimes you cannot. Sometimes the best thing to do for a friend is share a poem like this, one that fully understands the excruciating grief, and pray that the Holy Spirit will encourage them to move along with the father from his grief in the beginning to his hope at the end.

First published in An Unexpected Journal: Medieval Minds (2020)

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Aquinas, and Aristotle before him, saw that everything in the world had a cause. Just as the child knows that someone placed presents in his Christmas stocking, Aquinas’s first premise is that everything has a cause and that there is an “order of efficient causes.”^[2] An efficient cause is one that causes something else to be. Aquinas reasoned that something could not cause itself. He would find David Hume’s argument that the universe could cause itself absurd, for as Aquinas states in his argument, something cannot cause itself because then it would be prior to itself.^[3] It cannot cause something if it does not yet exist.

An illustration of the principle of efficient cause can be found in the movie Gremlins, produced by Stephen Spielberg. In the movie, the main character, Billy, is given an odd and friendly creature called a Mogwai by his father. His father was warned when he bought the Mogwai to not let it get wet, feed it after midnight, or expose it to sunlight. Billy is delighted by his new pet which he names Gizmo. The chaos starts when Billy and his friend accidentally spill water on Gizmo and five more Mogwais pop out of his back. These are not friendly companions like Gizmo, and they begin wreaking havoc.^[4]

Gizmo was the efficient cause for the second generation of five Mogwais. They did not spontaneously generate on their own and did not cause themselves, or they would have existed prior to themselves. This is an example of premise one and two of Aquinas’s Second Way. The next premise is that in a series of efficient causes, it is not possible for them to go on infinitely; there must be that first cause. This starting point and a termination is shown in the regeneration of the Mogwais. Obviously, the first cause is Gizmo. An intermediate cause is shown when one of the second generation Mogwais, Stripe, who, after turning himself into a malevolent gremlin by eating after midnight, seeks to generate an army of gremlins by jumping into a swimming pool.

What follows both shows that even in a fictional account, there is an understanding that there cannot be an infinite loop of causes as well as the flaws in the logic of the film itself. While an army of gremlins are spawned, there is a point where the regeneration ends. Why is that? The movie gives no explanation. If the logic in the film were followed, there would be an infinite generation of gremlins as Stripe continued to spawn in the pool, each new gremlin would also continue to infinitely spawn new gremlins. However, even in science fiction there is an appeal to common sense, even if the writer does not give a coherent reason. We take our reasoning and understanding from our world and fill in the gaps where the logic of the fantasy breaks down. We know that the series of causes cannot continue to infinity, so we understand that the generation stopped, even though we are given no explanation. Aquinas’s third premise that a series of efficient causes cannot go on to infinity is intuitive to us.

Aquinas’s conclusion from these three premises is that there must be a first uncaused efficient cause, which is known as God. Gremlins does not give any sort of reason or explanation for the existence of its first cause, Gizmo. The reasoning was so unsatisfactory that fans had to create an entire cosmology around the movie that explained his existence and goodness when all of the rest of the spawned Mogwais were evil. These good Mogwais, which were spawned only once in thousands of regenerations, were called “Eternals.”^[5] It is natural to us that what is good should be eternal.

Believers are given a much better explanation of a first efficient cause than the nonexistent one given by Spielberg. The name God gives to Moses to identify himself to the Israelites in Exodus 3:14, “I AM who I AM” indicates this sense of an uncaused and uncreated being who brought all other things into existence. Genesis 1:1 states, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” He was there before the beginning, an uncaused first efficient cause.

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He is also the end cause. Aquinas gives a second reason for the impossibility of an infinite series of efficient causes in that as every cause works towards an effect; there must be an ultimate effect, a final result to be achieved. The final letter to believers before the Revelation of John ends with the words, “All glory to him who alone is God, our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord. All glory, majesty, power, and authority are his before all time, and in the present, and beyond all time! Amen.”^[6] It is a reminder that no matter what happens, whatever God causes to be, he is already there and worked it according to his own good, and it was this that Jesus was referring to when he said, “It is finished.”^[7]

First published in An Unexpected Journal: Science Fiction (2020)

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Do you want to know what it is, Neo?

It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it?^[1]

In an unnamed future, Neo, a computer programmer by day and hacker by night, goes through the monotony of what he believes to be the grind of his day-to-day existence looking for meaning. Prompted by the sense of an elusive “other,” of something beyond the world in front of him, he searches lines of code hoping to find the answer.

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He believes the answer to be centered in a person called Morpheus, an elusive legend, a phantom voice whispered among the internet underground who is believed to have the answers to a greater system called the Matrix. The day comes when Neo is called by Morpheus, called out of his mundane existence, and given the opportunity to discover “the truth,” to see the world as it really is. Neo discovers what he believed to be reality was nothing but a facade designed to placate and control. Rather than an autonomous agent, he has been nothing more than property, a resource for a merciless controller. The Matrix highlights questions of both ethics and imaging.

MORPHEUS

This is your last chance. After this, there is no going back.

You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.^[2]

When Neo first encounters Morpheus, Neo is presented with a choice in the form of two pills: a blue pill and a red pill. Choose the red pill, and Neo sees the unvarnished truth of the world as it actually is. Take the blue, and he continues life as he always had. As Neo reaches for the red pill, Morpheus warns, “Remember, all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.”^[3]

The red pill activates a trace program, and Neo discovers that he, as his true self, is not actually what he believed himself to be. Rather than a maverick anti-authority computer programmer chasing the limits of the network and bending it to his will, he was a slave to it. The idea he had of himself was a product of a virtual reality system, a “neural interactive simulation,” that controlled every area of his perception. In truth, he was a prisoner trapped in a pod among a field of countless other humans all being harvested for energy to fuel the artificial intelligence that controlled the Matrix.

The year was not actually 1997 as Neo believed, but 2197 . . . as far as he knew. The exact details of human history had been destroyed along with the earth in a battle between humans and AI. As Morpheus explained, “It started early in the twenty-first century, with the birth of artificial intelligence, a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.”^[4] This new race wanted the same treatment as humans, at first, the same “inalienable rights,” but “whatever they were given, it was never enough.”^[5]

Imago Dei vs Imago Hominis

The relationship between God and man begins with the words in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our own image.” It is this connection that begets the relationship which fuels the desire for a connection with the one we image, as the writer of Ecclesiastes states, “God put eternity into the hearts of man.”^[6] This being made in the image of, what Irenaeus of Lyons referred to as the Imago Dei, is the essence of humanness. We are more than our bodies, simply matter. We are more than feelings, soul and mind. It is the spirit, the God-breathed “spiritual divine spark or seed” that makes us not only unique from the rest of creation, but it is the conduit through which we can reconnect to God.^[7] As Thomas Weinandy explains, “Thus, for Irenaeus, to be simply human clothes us with a dignity that is inconceivable, a dignity that pertains not to some spiritual aspect of our being, but to our very created humanness.”^[8] It is this imaging that gives us this idea of goodness, of right. There is a particular way things should be even though they aren’t, or as Morpheus put it, “that something was wrong with the world.” Why should we believe there is a right way if corruption, brutality, and exploitation are just part of the way the world has always been? How in the heavens can we have any expectation of something else unless it is heaven itself that gives us this idea?

This certainty that there is a “should be” is what Thomas Aquinas refers to as the “argument from degree” or a “gradation of being” in his five ways to know God.^[9] As each of us is created in the image of God, so we have an inner knowing of what is true, beautiful, and right. The fact that we all have an idea, an inner conviction, that a thing “should be” a certain way indicates that there is an ideal to be measured against. When an artist paints a picture of a person, the way we determine if it is “good” or not is by how well it resembles the person, either in depicting the person exactly or by highlighting a characteristic or trait of the individual. In the same way, a reproduction of a painting is considered to be “good” if it closely resembles the artist's original style and form.

In the same way, Aquinas’s Fourth Way states that we can know the evidence of God because we recognize that there is something that is the standard of perfection. In “On Goodness and the Goodness of God,” he defines the good as something that is “properly actual.”^[10] Good refers to the perfected; everything else is an approximation or shadow. Our definition of personal good is based on its relation to the ultimate act or being. This spectrum of similarity or dissimilarity to the good is referred to as a “gradation of being” in Aquinas’s Fourth Way.^[11] As Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is the cause of all its imitations and it is the most, the ultimate, and the perfected version of itself; God is the ultimate being to which all likenesses are compared.

This idea that not only is there an objective “right” but one that all should work towards is something C.S. Lewis identified as universal and labeled the Tao or “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”^[12] While the idea of a good and a perfection that we should all be seeking is a universal desire, the idea of good gods is not. As Thomas Weinandy explains in his essay, “Irenaneus and the Imago Dei,” “Within classical paganism, it was the gods who were modeled after the image and likeness of men and women and, in so being depicted, they possessed all of the foibles, weaknesses, and vices that human beings possess.”^[13] As ancient humans created gods in their own image, so do modern humans create AI in the world of The Matrix.

But what happens to the imager when the Image is flawed? As Louis Markos writes in Apologetics for the 21st Century:

Only a God who is separate from his creation can function as the Guide and Embodiment of pure moral goodness. If pantheism is correct and God is indistinguishable from his creation, then he can neither be good nor evil--he can only be an amoral spiritual force. In pantheistic religions, the gods do not live outside time and space but are themselves born out of the primal (material) chaos, they do not embody either a holy or universal standard and thus cannot serve as the source of our idea of the good.^[14]

In other words, there is no good without God, and there is nothing to have mercy towards. A being can be no better than the one who formed it, and the AI of the Matrix could be no better than the humans that developed its logic and code. Flawed human values would be its values. Humanity’s moral imperative became its imperative. As we see, the AI race followed in the footsteps of its makers exactly, whatever they were given . . . it was “never enough.”

The crux of the dilemma in The Matrix spotlights the consequences of departing from Judeo-Christian values. These Judeo-Christian values spawned the idea of individual rights that are equal to all.^[15] This equality of persons is also not something common to all historical human experience or in all religions.^[16] Buddhism teaches that there are levels of enlightenment, and one is condemned to repeat their life lesson until that lesson is learned.^[17] A stratification of society is embedded into Hinduism with the varnas or castes.^[18] But this specialness of not only the human race, but the preciousness of the individual sparkles like gemstones throughout the pages of the Hebrew scriptures. God cares about man himself.^[19] God tabernacles among man, and man images God himself.^[20] It is this last statement that guarantees value to every man.

But in the move from looking to God as the source of the image to man and the source of goodness, the humanists of the Enlightenment left God and focused on man alone. Without God as the grounding, the individual man is left as supreme authority. As Lewis warns, without that Divine grounding, there is nothing in man to check himself. That grounding Good is removed, and man’s own wants and desires are seen as the ultimate goal.

The desire to seek remains, but when there is nothing left but man, something must still be sought leaving man to seek things. The Matrix portrays a natural end to this individualistic mindset. It was just as C.S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man, “But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.”^[21] There came a time when the interests of the human and AI races clashed. When the offspring of the human race became too much of a threat, humans tried to annihilate their creation by scorching the sun. In a move worthy of the race they imaged, AI reflected human ingenuity by finding a new source for survival, enslaving and feeding off the humans who made them. AI rejected and abused their makers, just as humans rejected and killed their Source.^[22]

Ethical Grounding and Society

When property becomes the prime directive, ethics become relative. In a study on ethical ideologies, D.R. Forsyth noted that as an individual’s income increased, they tended to become “situationalists.” They believe that there is right and wrong but do not accept a universal right.^[23] The implication is that while they may very strongly believe that there is a right, without an absolute standard of rightness outside of themselves, their “right” becomes centered in themselves. This becomes a conflict for society as a whole when a particular person or group has the power to preserve their rights at the expense of others. As theologian John Stott observes, "Nearly all legislation has grown up because human beings cannot be trusted to settle their own disputes with justice and without self-interest."^[24] Without a grounding in an absolutely just Good, we are left to the will of those who can control the most. As the hrossa in Out of the Silent Planet note on the futility of trying to live without a Lawgiver, “They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair—or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it—like a female trying to beget young on herself.”^[25] We cannot give what we do not have. The greedy cannot give equity. The exploiters cannot give justice. Without a Great Good, an “I AM,” we are, like the humans of the Matrix, left to the mercy of whoever is willing to be the most ruthless.

Breaking the Matrix

CYPHER

Just between you and me, you don't believe it, do you? You don't believe this guy is the one?

TRINITY

I think Morpheus believes he is.

CYPHER

I know. But what about you?

TRINITY

I think Morpheus knows things that I don't.

CYPHER

Yeah, but if he's wrong —

The human race, both those plugged in and unaware and those fighting it, are trapped in a prison of their own devising. But in this humanistic dystopia, the gleam of the “other” shines through. There is a prophecy of “The One” who will break the power of the Matrix and free the human race. They will be able to live in the city of Zion in peace. It is based on this promise that Morpheus calls out Neo from his bondage within the Matrix. He believes Neo is the One so strongly that he is willing to sacrifice his own life to save Neo’s. This Messianic theme is so strong, moviegoers have remarked, “When I was watching the film, I kept getting Messianic feels, like how someone is destined to swoop in and save everyone.”^[26]

The ending is also Messianic — Christlike — a sacrificial death, a resurrection through the power of love, and an overcoming so completely of the Agents of the Matrix in a scene reminiscent of the Harrowing of Hell, that the Matrix loses all power over Neo. In a sense, “all authority” has been given to Neo, both within the Matrix and without.^[27]

After the Breaking: The New Beginning

One has to wonder if Neo is successful in dismantling the Matrix, what is next? If the AI overlords are defeated, will the human race fare any better? It seems the Watchowskis did not have an answer to that question either. The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003) descend into nihilism with the enemy losing its teeth, the hero his purpose, as well as the end vision of true deliverance.^[28] When there is nothing outside of the world, there is nothing but the world to look to. There is no escape and nowhere to go, so the Watchowskis reboot to the beginning. For all its Messianic beginnings, the trilogy ends in Buddhist-like purposelessness. What was the meaning of it all if it all ends as it began?

The Matrix can show us the danger of a relativistic worldview giving warning of where our avaricious path may lead, but it cannot give us a vision of hope. For that we must look to the One who is “the Son of God, this the Only-begotten, this the Former of all things, this the true Light who enlighteneth every man, this the Creator of the world, this He that came to His own, this He that became flesh and dwelt among us”^[29] Like Neo who overcame the hold of the matrix, Jesus became one of us to break the hold of our own Matrix, the power of sin.^[30]

Await Him that is above every season, the Eternal, the Invisible, who became visible for our sake, the Impalpable, the Impassible, who suffered for our sake, who endured in all ways for our sake.^[31]
- -Ignatius of Antioch

To read the original, unedited version of “Ethics of the Matrix,” click here.

First published in An Unexpected Journal: Science Fiction (2020)

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Tolkien alternatively described Bombadil as “an enigma” and “unimportant.” ^{[2] [3]} At times, he became more specific about Bombadil’s role in the world of Middle-earth, stating that he was “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside.”^[4] However, in Tolkien’s longer expositions on the nature and purpose of Bombadil, we see that Bombadil does actually reflect something quite important. Bombadil is a representation of an order and authority that is beyond the dominion of Middle-earth yet within it. The idea that Bombadil represents is most closely aligned with Melchizedek, that mysterious figure mentioned in the books of Genesis and Hebrews. Like Melchizedek, Bombadil’s origins are unknown and, like Melchizedek, Bombadil has an authority above and apart from his fellow countrymen.

Reader Response to Bombadil

While Tolkien fielded a number of questions regarding Bombadil, his most lengthy explanation is found in a letter written to Peter Hastings in September of 1954. Hastings questioned Tolkien on a number of issues that concerned him theologically, such as the fact that he did not believe that evil could create anything. Hastings took issue with the Dark Lord’s ability to “create” the orcs and the trolls, was bothered by the reincarnation of the elves, as well as the impracticality of intermarriage between elves and humans. He also questioned the status of Bombadil and believed that Goldberry’s statement that “He is” indicated that Bombadil was God.^[5]

The tone of Tolkien’s response as a whole was somewhat defensive. After all, he was responding to the manager of a Catholic bookshop. If Hastings felt that The Lord of the Rings promoted heretical ideas, it is very possible that sales could be discouraged within the Catholic community. Tolkien downplayed Bombadil’s status in the epic, as well as dismissed concerns about what Hastings felt was represented in the story, saying:

As for Tom Bombadil, I really do think you are being too serious, besides missing the point. (Again the words used are by Goldberry and Tom not me as a commentator.) You rather remind me of a Protestant relation who to me objected to the (modern) Catholic habit of calling priests Father, because the name father belonged only to the First Person.^[6]

Tolkien also responded to Hastings’s question regarding the reference to Bombadil as “He is” and “Master” with:

Lots of other characters are called Master; and if “in time” Tom was primeval he was Eldest in Time. . . Frodo has asked not “what is Tom Bombadil” but “Who is he” . . . We need not go into the sublimities of “I am that am” – which is quite different from “he is.”^[7]7

However, there are two issues with this. The first is that Tolkien has slightly skewed the account in Exodus. Moses asks the Lord, “’Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?’”^[8] Tolkien states that Moses’s question to the Lord and Frodo’s question to Goldberry are not anything similar because Tom and Goldberry were referring to names. This is exactly what Moses was asking, “What is your name?” Moses was not asking “What are you?” He knew the answer to that; he was speaking to a god. He was asking, “Who are you?” to what person or deity was he speaking. It was to this that the Lord replied, “I AM.” Goldberry gave a similar response to Frodo saying, “He is.”^[9]

The Origins of the Character of Bombadil

The character of Tom Bombadil predates the creation of The Lord of the Rings. The inspiration for the character was “found in a wooden-limbed ‘Dutch Doll’ owned by one of Tolkien’s children which was given the name ‘Tom Bombadil.”^[10] A fragment of the original story was found at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.^[11] It is but a three paragraph introduction to what appears to be intended as a longer work, two of which simply provide a setting. The third paragraph introduces Tom Bombadil with an appearance that is echoed almost word for word in The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien received a number of letters both inquiring more details about Tom as well as a request for more stories. One of those requests came from his aunt, Jane Neave, who asked if her nephew “wouldn’t get out a small book with Tom Bombadil at the heart of it, the sort of size of book that we old ’uns can afford to buy for Christmas presents.”^[12] Tolkien fulfilled this request in 1962 with the publication of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, with two stories that were specifically about Bombadil, as well as a number of other short stories and poems.^[13] The book was presented as the stories contained in Bilbo’s “red book.”^[14] The two poems “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” and “Tom Bombadil Goes Boating” were considered by Tolkien to be a prequel and a sequel to The Lord of the Rings with regards to Bombadil’s tale, telling the reader that one was written prior to the Ring’s epic and the second after Frodo’s visit to the house of Tom Bombadil.^[15]

There was obviously some rumination regarding Tom as Tolkien had some very firmly set ideas of Bombadil’s place within the framework of Middle-earth and how Tom should be portrayed. This is evident in his indignant response to Rayner Unwin in a letter dated April 8, 1958 regarding a film treatment for The Lord of the Rings. Stating that it was “evident that he has skimmed through the L.R. at a great pace, and then constructed his S.l. from partly confused memories, and with the minimum of references back to the original,” he also took exception to the reference of Bombadil as an “old scamp.” ^[16] He further elaborates saying, “This is a good example of the general tendency that I find in Z to reduce and lower the tone towards that of a more childish fairy-tale. The expression does not agree with the tone of Bombadil's long later talk.”^[17]

Another example of his very firm idea of how the gravitas of the character, which is sometimes portrayed as jolly, should be portrayed, can be found in his comment on the cover art for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. The illustrator designed a scene which wrapped from front to back with the main character from the poem Errantry, a mariner, on the front cover and Tom Bombadil on the back. While Tolkien had approved the design, it was not until he saw the produced copy that he saw the full effect and said, “Alas! . . . it is only now . . . that I observe that as an illustration, especially one to fit the general title, the picture should have been reversed: with Bombadil on the front, and the Ship sailing left, westward!”^[18] This looking westward has significance in the cosmos of Middle-earth. It is to the West that the Elves and Frodo sail when leaving Middle-earth. They are leaving Middle-earth and this life and moving into the next.

This picture of Bombadil as sort of a conduit or guide to the land beyond is a recurring theme. In a letter to Tolkien’s son, Christopher, in November of 1944, he gives an insight of how the saga of The Lord of the Rings will end.

But the final scene will be the passage of Bilbo and Elrond and Galadriel through the woods of the Shire on their way to the Grey Havens. Frodo will join them and pass over the Sea (linking with the vision he had of a far green country in the house of Tom Bombadil). So ends the Middle Age and the Dominion of Men begins^[19]

Through Bombadil, Frodo had a vision of what was to come. The West and the Undying Lands are similar to a picture of Heaven. That the Elves must pass out of Middle-earth in order for the Dominion of Man to begin is similar to what our own world must pass through before the establishment of the New Heaven and the New Earth where man can truly have dominion as he was originally intended.^[20]

Like Bombadil and Middle-earth, Melchizedek served as a conduit from this Age into the One to Come. Melchizedek was a priest of the Most High, but one that was before the establishment of the line of Aaron. His blessing upon Abraham conferred his priesthood. Melchizedek was a type, a foreshadowing of Christ who is “high priest forever.”^[21]

A Thing Unexplained

Tolkien resisted the efforts to nail Bombadil down with a definitive explanation; however, that does not mean that there are no parallels to something that we already know, or something that we should know. As Tolkien said himself in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” stories are about recovering what was once known but is now lost. It [recovery]

is a re-gaining — regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘seeing things as they are’ and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’ - as things apart from ourselves.^[22]

It is this seeing of the “apart” things that Bombadil represents in many of the same ways that sets Melchizedek as “apart.”

What Tolkien Thought About Bombadil

Tolkien felt that Bombadil represents that which is “unexplained” and a “mystery,” and that all good stories required this element of the unknown.^{[23] [24]} He has a point. The character had grown to a position in his mind that was more than the role Bombadil played in The Lord of the Rings. He must have felt that the insistence to nail every detail of Bombadil down to a precise “what” missed the totality of what the character represented.

As Timeless

One of Bombadil’s most puzzling characteristics to readers is his origin. The interest in Bombadil has not passed on with Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings fans debate at length the question of first things. How could Bombadil be the oldest when Gandalf stated that Fangorn was first? As Elrond mentions at the Council, the origins of Bombadil are unknown, he was without a father, and he was known by many names.

But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Be-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless. But many another name he has since been given by other fold: Forn by the Dwarves, Orald by the Northern Men, and other names beside. He is a strange creature.^[25]

Tom himself states that he was before creation in response to the question as to who Bombadil was, he answered:

Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless? But you are young and I am old. Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees. Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless—before the Dark Lord came from Outside.^[26]

He was “eldest” and existed “before the seas were bent.” There is an echo here of Genesis 1:2 giving a suggestion of being before the world was formed. This timelessness and eternality is also seen in the beliefs about Melchizedek. The writer of Hebrews states that Melchizedek was "Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God he remains a priest perpetually."^[27] The conclusion of readers is that Bombadil existed before creation while Treebeard was first of the created.^[28]

This same sort of intense speculation is found regarding the person of Melchizedek. Only appearing in one chapter of the Old Testament, Genesis 14, he was the high priest who oversaw the truce between Abraham and the King of Sodom.^[29] While only two verses in Genesis are given to Melchizedek, as with the interest in Bombadil, his role was a source of speculation through the centuries. Melchizedek is mentioned once again in the Old Testament in Psalm 110, one of the most powerful Messianic psalms, which begins with the Father saying to the Son, “My Lord (Yahweh) said unto my Lord (Adonai / Master), Sit at my right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for your feet.”^[30] After promising to put Adonai in power, Yahweh states, “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.”^[31]

It is this Psalm which the writer of the Hebrews quotes. By the time of the writing of the New Testament, much more had been supposed regarding Melchizedek’s origins and purpose. Two scrolls found at Qumran, The Genesis Apocryphon (1Q20) and The Heavenly Prince Melchizedek (11Q13), mention Melchizedek. ^[32] In the first, which is a recounting of Genesis, not much more is said regarding his nature and character than in Genesis 14; however, in the second we see the place this high priest has taken in the imagination of the followers of Judaism. The view of Melchizedek has progressed from not only a human servant of the Most High, but to one that is divine. In the year of Jubilee, the Year of Release and the Year of Grace, he will proclaim liberty to the captives, “avenge the vengeance of the judgments of God,” and “make them understand all the ages of time.” The writer is even more explicit concerning the divine status of Melchizedek saying, “and your ELOHIM is [Melchizedek, who will save them from] the hand of Belial.”^[33] Belial was a power that had dominion over a portion of the earth.

Bombadil rescues the hobbits not once, but twice during their journey. He comes upon them after they have been entrapped by the Willow Man whose "heart was rotten, but his strength was green and cunning."^[34] Before the hobbits are fully on their way, he must rescue them again from the clutches of the Barrow-wights, which are like death itself. The first is like the salvation from our own sinful nature, the second is similar to salvation's victory over death. Melchizedek himself was believed to make atonement for and save the "Sons of Light."

Conclusion

Tolkien very strongly resisted the comparisons of Bombadil to the divine, but in spite of those efforts, there are divine qualities seen in Bombadil’s character. As Tolkien states in his letter to Naomi Mitchison, “he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”^[35] This function is that of something beyond. Bombadil is from beyond Middle-earth and from beyond time. It is the same sense of beyond that Melchizedek provided to the followers of Yahweh as God gave them progressive revelation of the One who was to come.

In the world of Middle-earth, as well as our own where there is so much broken and bent, we need someone that is not subject to its corruption. We need someone like Melchizedek, a foreshadowing of Christ, who will bring justice. We need someone like Bombadil, and Christ himself, on whom the grip of evil has no sway. ^[36]

Of course, the parallel is not exactly the same. When asked if Bombadil could be persuaded to deal with the Ring, Gandalf replied, “’No . . . Not willingly. He might do it if the free folk of the world begged him, but he would not understand the need.”^[37] Bombadil is not particularly concerned with the rest of Middle-earth beyond his trees and streams while Melchizedek and the Savior he was a precursor to were very concerned.

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But yet, Tolkien was right when he said Bombadil represented something very important. Even though Tolkien did not create Bombadil to give glimpses of divinity intentionally, yet still he does. It may be a case as John MacQuarrie noted regarding artists in general that are “something like revelation. What is revealed has been there all the time, but it has gone unnoticed in our humdrum everyday experience. It needs the sensitivity of the artist to bring it to light, so that we notice things for the first time.”^[38] The need for a just mediator, rescuer, and redeemer has been here through all time.

First published in An Unexpected Journal: The Worlds of Tolkien (2020)

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This vision, one of perfect peace, seems to be a desirable end. Some might believe it is an end to be achieved at any cost. The pain and suffering in the world is the most oft-referenced argument against and criticism of God. If Lennon could imagine a world of perfect peace, why could not a perfectly good and perfectly omnipotent God manage to bring that about? As David Hume challenges in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, “is he [God] able and willing [to prevent evil]? Whence then is evil?”^[3] Director Joss Whedon gives an answer to Hume in his movie Serenity (2005) with a visual depiction of the Free Will Defense by Alvin Plantinga.^[4]

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In Plantinga’s Free Will Defense, he posits that an omnipotent God can do anything that is logically possible, but He cannot do that which is logically impossible. He cannot make married bachelors or square circles because those things are impossible by their very nature. In the same way, there are certain qualities of creatures that require the existence of the opposite in order for a thing to have virtue. There would be no bravery if cowardice was not an option. Cruelty makes kindness sweet in contrast. We would not have an appreciation of goodness without an understanding of evil. Plantinga suggests that

“A really top-notch universe requires the existence of free, rational, and moral agents; and some of the free creatures He created went wrong. But the universe with the free creatures it contains and the evil they commit is better than it would have been had it contained neither the free creatures nor this evil.”^[5]

C.S. Lewis presents the same argument in Mere Christianity writing, “. . . free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”^[6] To have a vibrant and vital world, individuals must be free. It is this freedom to choose right or wrong, love or hate, that brings about true virtue.

Plantinga and Lewis discuss this idea in theory. It is Whedon, an atheist, who brings the idea to life in film.

Creating a Perfect World

River: People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think. Don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.

Teacher: River, we’re not telling people what to think. We’re just trying to show them how.

The opening scene of Serenity.

The goal of making a new and better world precipitates the conflict of Serenity. In this space western, the known universe is now controlled by a corporate government, the Alliance, which attempts to keep all citizens under regulated order. While ostensibly benevolent, Alliance rule brooks no dissent. Nothing is allowed outside of the approved order. In opposition to this authoritarian rule are pockets of renegades, remnants of the Independents who fought against the Alliance in the Unification War, skirting the edges of society. One of these bands of renegades is led by Mal Reynolds, captain of the ship Serenity. He and his crew of misfits smuggle items on the black market, but his most dangerous cargo is medical doctor Simon Tam and his sister River. Simon risked everything to break River out of a high-security facility operated by the Alliance and they have now taken refuge on the Serenity in an effort to stay out of the Alliance’s grasp.

River is a psychic, a reader, who “sees into the truth of things.”^[7] In their attempt to weed out and crush the Independents, the Alliance had kept River prisoner, experimenting on her to fracture her perception of reality and control her mind. As the doctor heading the experiments tells the Operative who comes to investigate River’s escape, “Given the right trigger, this girl is a living weapon.”^[8] Their justification for torture and human experimentation is, as the Operative later explains to Mal,

Operative: I believe in something greater than myself. A better world, a world without sin.

Mal: So me and mine have to lay down and die so you can live in your better world?

Operative: I’m not going to live there. There’s no place for me there. Any more than there is a place for you, Malcolm. I’m a monster. What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.^[9]

The Alliance has identified the problem in society as aggression and strife, but their solution is more aggression and inflicted pain. The Operative recognizes this, and recognizes that he himself has no place in the world he is working to achieve. It is the conviction that evil means can bring about a good end that is the most dangerous as Inara Serra, a sometime associate of the Serenity crew, explains:

Inara: We have every reason to be afraid.

Jayne: Why? Because he beat up Mal? That ain’t so hard.

Mal: He didn’t beat me up. Who said that?

Inara: Because he’s a believer. He’s intelligent, methodical, and devout in his belief that killing River is the right thing to do.

Jayne: So . . . No hope of a reward huh?^[10]

The Operative will stop at nothing to achieve his ends. He is ruthless in his single-minded determination to annihilate anyone that threatens the Alliance’s goals.

The Problem of Free Will

The Alliance not only uses physical force, manpower, and psychological conditioning to achieve their unscrupulous ends, they have also developed a secret weapon. The crew of the Serenity is set on the road to the discovery of this secret after a bank heist goes wrong. Not only do Reavers (wild cannibalistic perversions of men, reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien’s orcs in The Lord of the Rings, which are a corruption of elves) arrive in the midst of the robbery , but River suddenly goes on the attack after her psychological conditioning is triggered by a subliminal message in a television commercial.^[11] With the help of a well-wired hacker, Mr. Universe, who accesses a video recording of River before her attack, the crew discovers River mentioned the word “Miranda” right before she is triggered. River explains that “Miranda” is a planet beyond Reaver territory.

The crew makes their way to the planet, disguising the Serenity as a Reaver ship. They discover Miranda is a terraformed and developed world, but one that is utterly silent. It is like entering a tomb. As they explore, they find corpses sitting in chairs, lying in streets, completely untouched and with no sign of violence. The discovery of a hologram explains the situation. Not content with brute force or messy psychological conditioning, the Alliance had devised another method, one intended to eliminate the need for those crude methods in the first place. They took the path Lewis predicted in The Abolition of Man when he wrote, “But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.”^[12] The Alliance attempted to “cut out all posterity” in a new image: one which eliminated all human aggression.

In Mere Christianity, Lewis suggests that a world without free will and without evil would result in a “shocking alternative,” for “free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating.”^[13] This came to fruition on Miranda. The air of the planet was poisoned by the Alliance with a gas to make its citizens more docile and to remove aggression. But rather than simply becoming “automata” as Lewis imagined, the results were more drastic. Without the fighting will, the drive, the majority of the citizens lost the will and desire for anything at all. As Plantinga quotes St. Augustine in God, Freedom, and Evil, “As a runaway horse is better than a stone which does not run away because it lacks self-movement and sense perception, so the creature is more excellent which sins by free will than that which does not sin only because it has no free will.”^[14] The Alliance obviously did not think this way. They attempted to remove the option to choose evil.

But for citizens of Miranda who did not die from lethargy and lack of will, the outcome was horrifying. In .1 percent of the population, removing free will left life devoid of goodness. The hologram discovered contained a recording by an Alliance explorer which revealed the truth:

Explorer: These are just a few of the images we recorded. And as you can see, it isn’t what we thought. No terraforming event, the environment’s stable. It’s the pack. The G-23 paxaloni hydrocloroform that we added to the air processors. It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well it works. The people here stopped fighting, and then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work. They stopped breeding, talking, eating, There were 30 million people here and they all just let themselves die. I have to be quick. About a tenth of a percent of the population had the opposition reaction to the pack. Their aggressive response increased beyond madness. They have become . . . well they’ve killed most of us. And not just killed, they’ve done things.

Jayne: Reavers. They made them.

Explorer: I won’t live to report this, but people have to know. We meant it for the best, to make people safer.^[15]

In Mere Christianity, Lewis reasons that “the better stuff a creature is made of—the cleverer and stronger and freer it is—then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong.”^[16] The Alliance attempted to create a new and better world by reprogramming those who were part of the problem. The Operative knew better; in his sinful state he could never be part of this new world, because he would pollute it with his presence. In contrast, the Alliance believed they could fix man as he was: simply tamping down the aggression, the fight or grit, would solve the problem. But what they found is that there is something so essential to the state of being human in that will to fight . . . for good or evil . . . that removing it ends in the destruction of man, whether due to death from the lack of the will to live, or due to corruption into another being entirely. Plantinga suggests that there are certain qualities that are “essential properties.” We would not be human without them.

The Alliance did not eliminate free will, they eliminated the determining drive . . . the force that motivates the choice. Without that drive, most ceased to exist. In the case of the Reavers, the drive was too strong for even the pacifying gas to eliminate. Instead, all feeling, compassion, and connection to other human beings was removed. In Whedon’s fictional world, empathy seems to be tied to the driving force behind the will as Lewis suggests in Mere Christianity. In their attempt to eliminate aggression, the Alliance eliminated the regard for self. In one set of the population, this resulted in their lack of will to maintain life itself. In the small percentage that became the Reavers, there was a horrible end resulting in beings that were human, but not quite. They not only did not have concern for others, but they had a lack of regard and respect for themselves. All that was left was an inferno of raging aggression. Serenity suggests that Plantinga is correct in believing that there may be a very different kind of good that God “can’t bring about without permitting evil” and that the particular good is love. The second command of the Master is to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”^[17] Without the appreciation of oneself as an Imager of God and a respect for what God has made in us, we cannot truly love another.

The Greatest of These is Love

Operative: The boy spent his entire fortune to develop contacts to infiltrate this place.

Doctor: He gave up a promising career in medicine. It’s madness.

Operative: Madness? Have you looked at this scan carefully, doctor, at his face? It’s love, in point of fact: something a good deal more dangerous.^[18]

The plot of Serenity is driven by the conflict created from the Alliance’s efforts to assert total dominance, but the underlying theme of the movie is self-sacrificing love. Simon gives up everything and risks all to rescue his sister. River, in turn, takes on a band of Reavers alone to save her friends. Mal continually acts against his own self-interest for the good of others, taking on impossible odds. He not only chooses this course for himself but encourages others to follow. Discovering the Alliance’s secret was not enough, it had to be exposed. For the crew of the Serenity, the only recourse to check the actions of a force operating with no accountability is to expose the tragedy of the planet Miranda to light.

Mal: Y’all got on this boat for different reasons, but y’all come to the same place. So now I’m asking more of you than I have before. As sure as I know anything I know this. They will try again. Maybe on another world. Maybe on this very ground swept clean. Maybe a year from now, maybe ten, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave. Shep used to tell me, if you can’t do something smart, do something right.^[19]

With the posthumous help of Mr. Universe, the crew attempts to broadcast the Miranda exposé to all Alliance-controlled planets. Surrounded by Alliance forces with seemingly no hope of escape, the Operative tells Mal it is over:

Operative: I’m sorry. You should know there’s no shame in this. You’ve done remarkable things, but you’re fighting a war you’ve already lost.

Mal: Yeah, well I’m known for that.[20]

Fighting on in the face of impossible odds is love which “. . . always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”^[21] Whedon makes this underlying theme clear in the closing scene of the film. After successfully exposing the horror of the Alliance’s actions on Miranda and coming to a draw with the Operative, the Serenity sets off for its next adventure with Mal at the helm and River as the copilot. As River launches the ship, Mal instructs his mentee:

Mal: Okay, clearly some aptitude. It ain’t all buttons and charts little albatross. You know what the first rule of flying is? Well, I suppose you do since you already know what I’m about to say.

River: I do. But I like to hear you say it.
Mal: Love. Can know all the ‘verse but take a boat in the air that you don’t love? She’ll shake you off just as sure as a turn in the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down . . . Tell you she’s hurtin’ ‘fore she keens . . . Makes her a home.

River: Storm’s getting worse.

Mal: We’ll pass through it soon enough.[22]

The atheist Whedon and the theist Plantinga both agree, “A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.”^[23] Without the freedom to choose good, actions have no meaning. What is more, there is no real being without that free will.

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The Greatest Love

But Whedon’s explanation still leaves us with a problem. We are back to the beginning, stuck in a world of strife and misery. Is there any hope to achieve the peaceful world of which Lennon and Isaiah dreamed? As Lewis explains in Mere Christianity, this longing for a world of peace and unity is one that is inspired by God Himself, “The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.”^[24]

We must be free to be truly good, but we fall short. We have a desire for a world that is different, but as the Operative points out, our sinful nature has no place in it. As the Teacher warns in The Great Divorce, Lewis’s imagining of a field trip to Heaven from Hell, “the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.”^[25] Each of us is a “maker of misery.” We have all “gone astray.”^[26] As we are, we would “infect” the perfect world we so want to reach.

Unlike Whedon, the Master Storyteller has a solution. It is a plan that does not eliminate our very essence of humanness, but one that redeems, restores, and perfects. The prophet Isaiah who foresaw this world of peace also prophesied its method of delivery. He writes as Yahweh, “I, even I, am the LORD, and there is no savior besides Me.”^[27] God’s plan is the story of the Greatest Love, one where He Himself laid down his life for His friends. This solves Whedon’s conundrum, for in doing so, “He Himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors.”^[28] As a result, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”^[29] This is the solution neither the Alliance nor Whedon could achieve, for only perfection can perfect. This is the Great Story brought about by Perfect Love.

First published in An Unexpected Journal: Film & Music (2019)

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As William Lane Craig notes in his comprehensive book on apologetics, Reasonable Faith, “Apologetics (from the Greek apologia: a defense) is that branch of Christian theology which seeks to provide a rational justification for the truth claims of the Christian faith.”^[2] However, just as the Christian faith goes beyond the mind and reason and demands a submission of the whole self: mind, body, and soul; so must apologetics engage more than simply the mind.^[3] In Apologetics and the Christian Imagination, Holly Ordway advocates for a more fully “integrated approach,” one which engages the hearer and urges them to “come and see” for themselves.^[4] It is in this engagement where literary apologetics shines. As Jesus demonstrated with his parables, a good story by a master storyteller seldom fails to gather interest.

An apologetic work is not defined by its overt “Christianness.” It does not depend on espousing established doctrine or incorporating theological terms; in the same way, there are no overt religious overtones in Jesus’s parables about Samaritans, shepherds, and seeds. However, the parables spoke to crowds and were recounted by Jesus’s disciples because, as George MacDonald explains when describing the value of good stories, they serve not “so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning.”^[5] Literature on any topic can serve an apologetic purpose as long as it reveals truth, goodness, and beauty.^[6]

However, literature is more suited to engaging the imagination than either lectures or logic because, unlike other methods of evangelism which only engage the intellect, literature engages the imagination. Unlike logic or lectures, literature tells stories which can touch the heart in a more profound and impactful way. It is this engagement with imagination that is the true power in literary works. Literature engages the imagination by not only exploring the known facts, but also prompting the exploration of the unknown.^[7] It is this faculty, the imagination, reaching towards and receiving the unknown that is essential to true Christian faith.

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What is Imagination?

Before exploring the role imagination plays in nurturing the Christian faith, we must first examine imagination itself. Macdonald describes imagination as an “imaging or a making of likenesses. The imagination is that faculty which gives form to thought—not necessarily uttered form, but form capable of being uttered in shape.^"[8] What is more, imagination is “revelations of thought,” and a good imagination is the “presence of the spirit of God,” the end of which is harmony.^{[9] [10]} If something is revealed, it is something that comes from outside of oneself. MacDonald argues that just as man came from the imagination of God, man’s imagination itself is derivative of God’s imagination.^{[11] [12]} J.R.R. Tolkien agreed with this sentiment and added that art is “the operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation” and that man is, as God’s ‘Imager’, “Sub-creator, the refracted Light.”^{[13] [14]} Although fallen, “Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. / Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned, / and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned.”^[15] A bad imagination is a corruption of that which was once good, an abandoning of God’s law.^[16]

If wise imagination is the revelation of God’s thoughts about and towards man, it follows that imagination is one of the primary ways God speaks to man. Our physical bodies are overwhelmed by the world immediately surrounding us. The soul is in bondage to the corrupted world. But the spirit still speaks and the imagination is the language of the spirit. It is, as MacDonald states, “the duty of the imagination to understand God.”^[17] To know God, we must have an imagination to receive Him.

Necessary Beliefs of Christianity

However, it is not enough to simply know God or know about Him. The Christian faith requires not only an acknowledgement of God, but the belief in several very specific things. One of the most succinct statements of the Christian faith is found in Romans 10:9 “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved.” This is a simple formula, yet one that requires belief in several elements that stretch the human imagination: the belief in an all-powerful God, that this God came as the man Jesus, and that death was defeated in the resurrection of Christ. Returning the dead back to life is humanly impossible. In order to believe this, one must believe in a God who both could and would do such a thing. This requires imagination.

Believing in the Unseen

The revelation of a God who is willing and able to intervene in the affairs of man is a story He has told since creation, in fact within Creation itself. As G.K. Chesterton muses in Orthodoxy, the very spectacularness of the world, the intense specificness of nature, indicates One who has an intense interest. To Chesterton, this revelation was magical, and what is more, he came to feel as if “magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have someone to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently.”^[18] MacDonald expresses the same sentiment in a slightly different way saying, “All the processes of the ages are God’s science; all the flow of history is his poetry.”^[19] In Nature, we see the stage of God’s story on full display. It is His apologetic work, an inspiration to imagine One whose glory Creation reflects. All of this points to One beyond our world, One unseen yet present. As Tolkien notes, “the human mind is capable of forming mental images of things not actually present.”^[20] Nature is part of God’s setting with man as the main character in His story told throughout history.

Discovering the Nature of God

Literary apologetics can aid in facilitating the reader’s understanding of God by highlighting aspects of God’s character. If God is love, what does true love look like? If God is good, how do we recognize what goodness is?^[21] What makes a good story? Do people want to read about oppressors oppressing and the corrupt continuing to go free? Who wants to read that sort of story? We see that going on around us every day; it is the natural way of things. We want heroes who fight evil, withstand adversity, and help those in need. The enduring stories throughout culture are those where truth wins, the meek inherit the earth, and the impossible becomes possible. We desire these stories because they are reflections of the overarching story of the Original Author. The "unexpected end" is a recurring characteristic in God's story. Tolkien describes stories where the unexpected occurs as a eucatastrophe, a “good catastrophe” or a “sudden and joyous turn.”^[22] It is these sorts of stories that train the mind and imagination to recognize and believe in a loving, just, and victorious God, the “I AM” of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Paul.

The course of events in human history is, as Louis Markos explains in his work Achilles to Christ, a “sacred story.”^[23] There is a plan and a purpose through history which points to a Purposer. Not only does God reveal Himself and his own plan and purpose through the story of human history, but He sends confirmation of that purpose through the imagination of man taking the form of what C.S. Lewis calls the “good dreams” of the pagan.^[24] God invades enemy territory, connecting with Man through the imagination by inspiring stories throughout cultures of a dying and rising god, who through his death makes things right. These imaginative stories prepared the way for the Gentile to recognize the Redeemer that had come.

Recognizing the Need for a Savior

Christ has come. The Deliverer is here. Most in today’s culture have heard about Christ; however, many do not understand why they need him. One of the most effective uses of literature as an apologetic engagement of the imagination is Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. The doctrine of atonement has been vigorously debated for two millennia. Councils have given decrees and churches have split over explanations on precisely how atonement works. Lewis clothes the logic of the Atonement in a story and speaks directly to the imagination through his world of Narnia with Aslan, a Christ-like character who offers himself in place of the transgressor. The story is easy to understand: a wrong has been done, a price must be paid, and Love pays the price. We may not understand exactly how substitutionary atonement works, just as most of us do not understand exactly how a combustion engine operates; however, just as we can recognize the operation of that combustion engine every time we drive a car, so we can recognize the operation of substitutionary atonement in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Our imagination allows us to accept in faith that it works even though our intellect cannot explain how it does.

Believing in the Impossible

The other element required by the Christian faith is the ability to believe an event that is impossible through solely natural means. This is often a struggle for those indoctrinated by the dictators of naturalism who would say there is nothing more to see and nothing more that can be known other than what is right in front of us. Chesterton might conclude that the willingly blind were not read enough fairy tales as children to have such a rigid and unaccommodating worldview. The fact that we are who we are in the place where we are at should be evidence to the most hardened skeptic that the impossible and the unexpected can, and does at times, happen. We, humans in particular and the world in general, do not have to be at all. That there is one man is surprising, what Man is as a whole, even more. That we are should be “more vivid to us than any marvel of power, intellect, art or civilization.”^[25] When we consider the oddness of human existence, it should be less odd that one particular person rose from the dead.

To believe these things, the unseen God, the God come as man, and the resurrection, we must have the ability to imagine that it might be possible. There is a difference between what is logically impossible and what happens consistently. Improbable is not impossible. However, if we have no stories of the improbable and fantastic to grow and develop our imagination, it may be hard to conceive. Here enters the benefit of story, the “laws of fairyland” as Chesterton calls it, where any number of improbable things may happen and do.^[26] Stories where the fantastic occurs build a case for the impossible. Each story paints a picture and prompts the question, “What would happen if . . .?” It instructs and trains the faculty of vision for those who have none. It sparks a train of thought that perhaps what we think we know is not what is, that there is more to the world around us than what we immediately see. “The vision is always a fact,” Chesterton warns; “It is the reality that is often a fraud.”^[27] It is this ability to see and imagine beyond that allows us to imagine and look to the unseen. Apologetic literature can build a case for God.

What is Faith?

While the resurrection is the single event upon which all of Christianity stands, faith is the single act on the part of the believer upon which peace with God depends. We receive the grace of God through our faith in the work of Christ on the cross. From the beginning of God’s interaction with man, it has been faith that has made one righteous. Abel, through faith, brought an offering that pleased God.^[28] Abraham believed God, and his faith was counted as righteousness.^[29] It is impossible to please God without faith.^[30] We must have faith, but what is it and how is it developed?

The writer of Hebrews defines the nature of faith in the first verse of the faith chapter, Hebrews 11, “For faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”^[31] Faith is believing that the unseen is and that the impossible can happen. We have to have the capacity for faith before we can actually have faith. If we are not able to imagine anything outside of our own reality and conceive of what is unseen and that the naturally impossible can happen, we cannot have faith in the unseen God who performs what is humanly impossible.

As previously noted, MacDonald believed that imagination does not create meaning, but it is waking to meaning. It is as if a man sits in a garden, completely insensate. He cannot see, hear, taste, touch, or smell and is ignorant to the paradise surrounding him. But suddenly, there is a faint whiff of something. It is a smell of sweetness, a fragrance never before experienced. As he sits and enjoys, he begins to wonder “What can this be? From where does this come?” His mind engaged, he begins to mentally explore the possibilities, attuned to other experiences that might come his way. He continues to wait for the fragrance to come again, then there is something new, a slight breeze rustles his hair, and comprehension begins to dawn that there is more around him than he previously realized. His atrophied senses begin to revive to their purpose so long neglected. This awakening of physical senses is comparable to the growth of imagination, which MacDonald describes in this way: “Perceiving truth half hidden and half revealed in the slow and stammering tongue of men who have gone before them, they have taken up the unfinished form and completed it; they have, as it were, rescued the soul of meaning from its prison of uniformed crudity.”^[32] MacDonald's description of imagination parallels the examples of the faithful in Hebrews. They could not see the end, but they believed. They could imagine that God would do what He said and put their trust, their faith, in that word.

We live in a darkened and corrupt world, one with only a remnant of the memory of what we once were. To have the hope that things can be otherwise, that someday “Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know” requires an imagination capable of grounding that hope.^[33] Literature with tales of transformation and redemption and accounts of prevailing against “impossible” odds builds a case for faith.

Partnering with God Through Literary Apologetics

We see the supernatural around us every day. The Holy Spirit is ever present, waiting for both an opportunity and a welcome to intervene in our lives. However, we often miss the opportunity to see the works of God that are already happening in our midst because our minds are not prepared to receive it. After his triumphal entry, Jesus foretold of his coming death and questioned if he should ask God to save him from his upcoming trial. A voice from heaven spoke saying, “I have already brought glory to my name, and I will do so again.” People in the crowd heard differently. Some thought it was thunder, while others heard the voice and thought it was an angel who spoke.^[34] Each person was present for the same event. Why was their perception so different? Some heard the confirmation from God Himself regarding the identity of Jesus, while others were so closed to the possibility of anything more, anything beyond, that their senses turned this extraordinary event into the most mundane. God spoke directly to them and they missed it. Their imagination had not prepared their eyes to see nor their ears to hear.

One must have an understanding of rightness and goodness, what Lewis refers to as “the Tao” in The Abolition of Man, before one can understand its Author. Before there is a yearning for God and a seeking of His face, there is a yearning for what is not but what yet should be. Lewis describes this Tao as:

It is Nature. It is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.^[35]

It is this “great exemplar” towards which literary works can point. In Restoring Beauty, Markos explores the ways that literature and other imaginative works develop or destroy. Markos uses the Ransom Trilogy of Lewis as an example of a literary work that inspires the ascent of the soul, pointing out that in each book the protagonist grows “slowly toward the good, the true, and the beautiful, while the antagonists move increasingly away from all good, all truth, and all beauty.”^[36] As the reader identifies with the protagonist, he wages the same mental war along with him on which path to choose: good or evil, illusion or reality, “bent” or straight. The reader may make bad choices in his own life on a regular basis; however, literature that is a “good companion” can suggest an alternate route.^[37] It can give the reader the idea of what it would be like to choose well. If actions begin with a thought, the directed thoughts within apologetic literature can point the reader towards choosing a new path.

Conclusion

We live in a fallen world with a barrage of forces and influences that seek to obscure God. However, each individual has been given the faculty of imagination. The imagination is God’s “back channel” for communication and is necessary to understand and know God. We must have an imagination to believe in the unseen and that the naturally impossible does at times happen. We live in a world that needs to know the God who cares, the One who is there through every circumstance. If people are not prepared to see Him yet, they need stories that can help get them there.

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Prophecy is nothing except a spoiler of God’s story, a sneak preview of what is coming down the road, and God’s first apologetic act was his prophecy to Eve that her disgrace was not the end of the story. Although she was the door through which disaster came, not only would justice win but she would be the door through which redemption would come.^[38] God told her, “Don’t give up hope. This story isn’t over yet.” The message from the beginning is the same message for today. It is one that needs to continue to be retold. The story is not over. Redemption is waiting to be had. There is hope. Literary “sub-creators” who create those “best companions” point a person along the path to God.^[39]

First published in An Unexpected Journal: Imagination (2019)

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Courage is denoted by action. There must be something within that impels the action. As Lewis notes in his review on Ajax and Greek Tragedy, “behaviour is primarily a symptom from which to infer the ‘haunting’ latencies of the psyche."¹ It must be within first before it can come out.

This has not always been our belief or how our stories have been told. In the ancient myths, heroes were those who were of divine descent. They could perform extraordinary feats because they themselves were extraordinary, more than human. In the same essay, Lewis points out this change in origin of the impetus came about because of “Christianity and then by liberal individualism."² Our stories of courage shifted from the divinely gifted few among the ordinary masses to the Everyman: stories where the innate human dignity flowers and flourishes. The extension of this is that the courageous and benevolent acts of the hero displace the demigods from the pedestal they formerly occupied.

Culture Needs Heroes

A culture is shaped by the heroes that it reveres. A culture’s stories portray heroes with qualities that the society values and which citizens should emulate. However, there is an interesting shift that has occurred in the past several decades in the popular stories of our culture. As our society has progressed into postmodernism and further away from Christian values, so have our heroes. Our heroes are no longer those who exemplify praiseworthy character qualities such as goodness, fidelity, and kindness, but there is almost a glorification of the very opposite. As Louis Markos notes in Restoring Beauty, “We are often more afraid of beauty than of ugliness.³”

Not only is the ugly and the vile celebrated, but along with this has come the devaluation of the self, the intrinsic worth of the individual. Our heroes don’t look like us anymore. Luke of Star Wars is born with an innate ability to manipulate the Force: part of a class of a sci-fi version of demigods, if you will. We have returned to a stratification in the cosmos of cultural heroes found among that of the ancient pagans, sometimes with literal reintroductions into popular culture of ancient gods such as Thor and Loki.

What encouragement can the common man draw from the exploits of these super beings? Example cannot be taken from them as they are in another class entirely. The only message that can be taken is to wait for someone better equipped to handle the problems life brings. Passivity is cultivated. A spotlight on this dilemma is made in this year’s release, The Incredibles 2. The sister (and villain) of the superhero patron wants to destroy the supernaturally gifted because she resents the public’s reliance upon them and blames this reliance for her parents’ death.⁴ As Richard Brody points out in his review of the movie in The New Yorker, the film director Brad Bird presents both the reliance on these super beings as well as the super heroes’ “detachment . . . from morality” as a good and desirable thing.⁵ The message is that there is one set of rules for the small group of gifted and another for everyone else. In this worldview the gifted, who can be identified as those Lewis labeled the “Conditioners” in The Abolition of Man, have the right to decide the course of action and the destiny of all others.⁶

So what is the answer? If we are to reclaim our culture and reinstate the value and potential for greatness that is found in each human being rather than the dependence of the masses on the preternaturally gifted few, what kinds of stories should be told?

The Stories that Need to be Told

In a culture that is searching for meaning, it is more important than ever to tell stories that point to the path of courage for each individual. As Markos quotes from The Sacred Romance, that “In some deep place within, we remember what we were made to be, we carry with us the memory of gods, image-bearers walking in the Garden."⁷ Not a separate class of demigods, but rather we are called to be the children of God. We matter.

However this path has obstacles of our own making: our pride, our flaws, and our failures. We look to our past and circumstances which often seem overwhelming; it looks as if we will never overcome. When we cannot see beyond our present circumstances and the way to a different outcome, it is hard to have hope. The stories of personal transformation, showing how one person went from a failure to victor can encourage those looking for an answer. As Nicole Howe notes in her essay on Augustine’s Confessions, “the journey of wandering and overcoming is not a physical journey; it is a spiritual one."⁸ The stories of true value are not just those with quirky characters and interesting plot twists, but those that illustrate the path of personal transformation and growth.

An example of this type can be seen in two very different stories in two different mediums: the book Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis,⁹ and the film Dear Frankie (2004) directed by Shona Auerbach.¹⁰ Each story begins with a conflicted female protagonist who hides from the truth in one way or another. Both rise above an abusive background. Both begin with a distorted view of love and operate out of fear. The themes of the two stories are similar; however, the details are very different.

Till We Have Faces is Lewis’s retelling of the myth of Psyche and Cupid. Set in the fictional kingdom of Glome (a distant neighbor of Greece), the story is told from the perspective of Psyche’s sister, Orual. From birth, Psyche is beautiful both in word and in deed. The outer beauty is a manifestation of the inner grace. Orual describes it as:

It was a beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it. While she was with you, you were not astonished. It seemed the most natural thing in the world as the Fox delighted to say, “She was according to nature”; what every woman, even every thing ought to have been and meant to be, but had missed by some trip of chance. Indeed when you looked at her you believed for a moment, that they had not missed it. She made beauty all around her.¹¹

Orual, on the other hand was singularly ugly. She did not draw all people to her through face and form, but she cared for Psyche after her mother’s death. Psyche was the focal point in her life. When Psyche was offered to the Shadow brute to appease the anger of Aphrodite (known as Ungual in Glome), she risked the wrath of the king and the people in an attempt to save her.

However Orual, as did the sister in the original myth, pushed Psyche to disobey her love’s command by looking upon him, precipitating a disastrous series of events. Psyche was then lost to her and Orual had to continue her life alone. This love that had been the focal point of her life turned into bitterness: bitterness against the gods and bitterness against Psyche herself. For her love for Psyche was, as Lewis refers to it in The Four Loves a “Need-love,"¹² one which loves because of what it receives in that love. It was, as Orual’s mentor Fox warned her, “one part love in your heart, and five parts anger, and seven parts pride."¹³

This “Need-love,” because it is based in self, does not end simply in being filled by the object of its affection, it must devour. As Psyche told Orual,

You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred. Oh, Orual—to take my love for you, because you know it goes down to my very roots and cannot be diminished by any other newer love, and then to make of it a tool, a weapon, a thing of policy and master, an instrument of torture—I begin to think I never knew you.¹⁴

This theme of a corrupted and manipulative love, a “Need-love,” is also found in the film Dear Frankie. The protagonist is a mother who is on the run from her abusive husband with her son and her mother. As with Orual’s possessive love towards Psyche, the husband’s love had long ago devolved into a thing that damaged and devoured.

Directed by Shona Auerbach, the film illustrates a woman transformed over the course of the film, from one who lives in fear to a lioness who faces it.¹⁵ However, this change comes gradually, slowly building like the beautiful melody of the theme song composed by Alex Heffes. We may not be able to put our finger exactly on the moment when the change occurs, but the full transformation is evident when the moment of truth comes.

When we meet Lizzie and her son, Frankie, she is arriving at a new town to temporarily call home. In contrast to Psyche who traveled the land to perform quests to be reunited to her love, Lizzie goes to great lengths to stay out of her husband’s reach. For three years she has moved from town to town in Scotland, always on guard, ready to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice. She lives like a refugee escaping the terror of her former life, always trying to stay one step ahead of her past which is trying to catch up with her.

In her effort to protect Frankie from the knowledge of what his father is and to keep questions at bay, she fabricates a story that his father is a seaman on a ship called Accra. In order to continue this charade, she writes periodic letters to Frankie impersonating his father as he should be and with which Frankie corresponds. This deception is motivated by love and a desire to keep her son safe; however, like Orual’s, it is a controlling love. Just as Orual withholds bits of information in order to manipulate outcomes, such as acknowledging she did actually catch a glimpse of Psyche’s home when speaking to Fox and distorting Fox’s words when convincing Psyche to break her word to her husband, Lizzie keeps tight control on the information she shares with those around her. It is this manipulation of truth that brings about a crisis that forces a revelation in the end. ^{16 17}

Development Through Circumstance

However, before the shadow can lift, darkness has to be exposed to the light . . . especially the darkness within. Orual loses the person closest to her by trying to control and refusing to let go. In her mind, she is in the right of it and her actions are justified. As with the superheroes in The Incredibles 2, she sets her own rules. Refusing to reflect on her own actions after the loss of Psyche, she continues on to rule the kingdom of Glome in service of others, but always alone.

If Orual’s “Need-love” was a combination of love, anger, and pride, Lizzie’s is equal parts fear and love. She keeps her secrets from everyone around her . . . her son, her mother, and her friends who are by necessity transitory . . . in an effort to maintain control of the situation. However, for Lizzie, circumstances begin to escalate that are far beyond her control.

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After the little family begins to get established in their new community and obtains a sense of balance, exposure threatens on two different fronts. The first comes in the form of Frankie’s cocky friend Ricky who shows him a newspaper announcement that the ship Accra will be docking in Greenock the following week, making a bet with Frankie that his dad will not come to see him. Betting his prized cards against Frankie’s precious stamp collection, he seems certain that Frankie’s father will be a no-show. From where does this confidence come? Perhaps Auerbach agrees with filmmaker Krzystof Kieslowski who once stated, “Children know more because they think with their instinct, not their reason."¹⁸ Somehow Ricky senses the situation is off and believes he has a sure thing.

This revelation also prompts a second issue not immediately apparent. Because Frankie diligently charts the path of his dad’s ship, his map shows the ship should be approaching the coast of Africa, not anywhere near Greenock, Scotland. This begins to raise questions in Frankie’s own mind which are pieced together in the end. Lizzie, like Orual and Lewis’s “Conditioners”, believes she has the best in mind for her son; however, within each of us is a desire for truth that will forever push against the curtain of deception, no matter how lovingly hung.

However, it is not only this incident and the pending exposure to Frankie that is disturbing Lizzie’s world. Her past life is also threatening to catch up with her. Lizzie’s mother, Nell, discovers an ad looking for Lizzie and Frankie placed by Lizzie’s in-laws. Nell attempts to get her son-in-law’s family to leave them alone, but instead the size of the ad is exponentially increased along with a photo of Lizzie. The family, like Ricky, is not going to go away quietly.

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Exposing Darkness to Light

These incidents occurring all at one time make Lizzie realize that she cannot continue the deceit. She begins to tell Frankie; however, when she realizes how emotionally invested he is in the imaginary picture of his father she has created, she is spurred to drastic and ill-considered action. Rather than confessing the whole, she instead decides to find a man, a stranger, who will impersonate Frankie’s father for one day. After failing miserably at the local pub, she is disconsolate and wanders the streets ending up by the bay. It is here that her friend, Marie, finds her the next morning. The entire sequence is mostly silent. It is the silence itself that conveys Lizzie’s loneliness and desperation. Lizzie confesses her plight and Marie offers to find a man to fit the job, a stranger to play Frankie’s dad for a single day. This releasing of her tightly controlled secret to another is the beginning of Lizzie’s transformation. As she acknowledges her vulnerability and opens up to another, the chains of manipulation, control, and fear begin to loose their hold.

While circumstances cumulate quickly in Lizzie’s life, Orual’s transformation from one consumed by a “Need-love” to surrendering to the Divine “Gift love” takes place over a longer period of time.¹⁹ Although no one takes the place that Psyche held in her heart, through the years there are others close to her which are impacted by her self-focused love: Fox, her mentor; Bardia, her second-in-command; and Redieval, her remaining sister. Because her opinion and view of the people close to her is defined by the actions and attention coming in to her, how her own needs are filled, not only does she never truly see them, but she herself is never truly known because her “glass,” to use the Apostle Paul’s metaphor, is clouded with self-interest.²⁰

Even the love and care poured into Psyche was tainted with need, Psyche may have been loved and admired by all, but Orual was loved by Psyche. If all admire a desired one but the desired one admires you, you are in the superior position. From the first, Orual’s care is motivated by a desire to control, it is a selfish and jealous love as finally revealed in the conclusion when she confronts the gods to make her complaint for their actions.

We want to be our own. I was my own and Psyche was mine and no one else had any other right to her. Oh you’ll say you took her away into bliss and joy such as I could never have given her, and I ought to have been glad of it for her sake. Why? What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which I hadn’t given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy, that way? It would have been better if I’d seen the Brute tear her in pieces before my eyes.²¹

Death Before Rebirth

For both Lizzie and Orual, before there can be a rebirth into something new, that which is corrupted in the old must die. Lizzie must rise above the fear which has bound her and Orual must release the pride which has prevented her from seeing the truth of her actions. For both, the spiritual renewal is precipitated by a physical death.

While there have been outbursts where Orual’s self-centered actions are on display throughout the narrative, the only perspective given to the reader is Orual’s own. In her mind, her actions are warranted. It is not until the death of her close friend and military commander, Bardia, that she is forced to examine herself. Throughout his final illness, Orual is indignant that he is away for so long, certain that it is his wife that is keeping him away. Even when she hears of his death, her only thoughts are of how it affects her and regrets that “all would be bearable if, only once, I could have gone to him and whispered in his ear, ‘Bardia, I loved you."²²

It is not until she visits Bardia’s widow, Ansit, to give her condolences that Orual is forced to take a hard look at herself, her actions, and her motivations. Pushed past courtesy in her grief, Ansit confronts Orual with her narcissism which consumed without thought of those around her. The clear mirror held by Bardia’s wife is not one Orual can ignore.

Orual leaves incensed, but it is no use. Her conscience so long muffled is revived and “those divine Surgeons had me tied down and were at work. My anger protected me only for a short time; anger wearies itself out and truth comes in. For it was all true - truer than Ansit could know."²³ A flood of other memories come in until Orual has to admit that what she had called love is “a sickening thing."²⁴ All that she had prided herself on is as ashes until “nearly all that I called myself went with it. It was if my whole soul had been one tooth and now that tooth was drawn. I was a gap. And now I thought I had come to the very bottom that the gods could tell me no worse.²⁵”

For Lizzie, it is the impending death of her estranged husband that causes her to face her fears. The film up to this point has been one of sparse words and stretches of silence. Meaning is communicated through what is not said. In contrast, the hospital scene where she faces her husband is the most verbal and sound filled portion of the film. It is as if Lizzie steps from the half-light of a twilight world back into reality to face and vanquish her dragons. The light is brighter; there is background noise and more words. A war is being waged. Some words are violent words from Frankie’s father when his will is thwarted and he once again threatens Lizzie. Lizzie must acknowledge and face the fears that have kept her in bondage and allow the courage that has been silently germinating, nurtured by the love and support of those around her, to arise. Lizzie does not turn and run this time, but draws on her newly found courage and denies him.

New Vision

For both Lizzie and Orual, the vanquishing of the old brings about restoration and new beginnings. After the emptying of her pride and her rebellion abandoned, Orual is finally in a condition where she can hear the gods when they speak.²⁶ She acknowledges, “I could mend my soul no more than I could mend my face, unless the gods helped."²⁷ Orual experiences a vision in which she presents her complaint to the council of gods. As she reads the litany of the wrongs she believes she has suffered at their hands, her true self and her true voice are heard. Not only can she not deceive the gods, but she cannot deceive herself. The last vestiges of her false construction of self come crashing down and she realizes “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"²⁸ Her spiritual transformation and physical journey are complete, and at the end of her life, she sees the beauty in herself that was always hidden by the pride which obscured.

While both Orual’s physical life and spiritual transformation are completed at the same time, Lizzie's transformation brings about a new chapter. Dear Frankie ends with Lizzie discovering Frankie at the bay sitting at the end of the pier. Sitting down beside him and leaning against him, the scene closes with the two sitting there, which Frankie described at the beginning of the film as “the end of the world.” It is the end of that world for them, one which had been lived in fear and filled with deception, and the beginning of a new based on a foundation of truth. However, the viewer is not given a neatly wrapped ending and resolution. Lizzie's journey is ongoing; her destination not yet determined.

The Apostle Paul assures us in Romans 8:28 that in spite of circumstances, God is working together all things for our good. Good does not always mean pleasant. Good in this context means transforming us into the image of Christ. Like Orual who was knocked down and trampled by the golden-wooled rams in the field of her vision (representing the acts of the gods), she found herself "butted and trampled . . . Yet they did not kill me. When they had gone over me, I lived and knew myself, and presently could stand on my feet."²⁹ Life can, and often does, run us over, but it is at times that very discouragement and defeat that ultimately brings us to a place of victory. Just as Lizzie and Frankie had come "to the end of the world," it is when we come to the end of ourselves that God can begin. It is the stories of individual transformation, where the weak are made strong and the corrupt are made right, that need to be told because it is only through our individual transformation . . . the making of a hero . . . that society as a whole can be redeemed.

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This version of the essay developed out of one written on auteur theory in a graduate program for cultural apologetics. You can read the original essay here: Shona Auerbach: Creating Poetry on Screen

First published in An Unexpected Journal: Courage, Strength, & Hope (2018)

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The site is familiar to those who have never visited Rome. It has been filmed in several movies such as La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life)^[1] and Three Coins in a Fountain. In the latter, the fountain is a focal point of the plot line and includes the legend that claims if one tosses three coins over the left shoulder into the fountain, the person will return to Rome and find their true love.^[2] It is a place where hopes are fulfilled.

There is a sense of peace and a desire to linger when walking near the fountain. People can be found sitting around the fountain at any hour of the day. It is a meeting place; a place where if a wish is made, that wish will come true.

Where does this sense of hope come from? Looking at the images in the sculpture, at first glance one would think it was created in the pre-Christian era of the Roman Empire. It was not. It was actually created by Nicola Salvi through a commission of Pope Clement XII in 1730 AD. Neither Clement nor Salvi lived to see the full design of the project to completion. All of the elements of the design were finally finished and the fountain inaugurated on May 22, 1762 AD.^[3]

While the current fountain was designed in the 18^th century, various fountains have been at the site since shortly before the time of Christ. The earliest legend of the site tells us that in 19 BC a virgin led weary Roman soldiers to the spot where they found fresh water. An aqueduct was built from this spot to bring water to the city. Later, the Church of St. Ignatius was built at this location.^[4]

Plain prophecies were given to the Jewish people to watch for the Redeemer of Yahweh, who chose them as his own people. However, embedded in the myths of every culture are hints and promises of God. Some were more explicit like the sayings of the Greek Sibylline Oracles. Others, like the legend were a hint and a foreshadowing. As the virgin Mary brought forth the Savior of the world, a virgin leads the weary to the source of fresh and ever flowing water.^{[5] [6]}

Salvi designed Ocean to be the focal point of the scene who is "the personification of an immense river that flows around the earth and from which all streams of water derive."^[7] Water represents life and the Holy Spirit in the Bible. One of the most dramatic visions in the Bible was written by John in his Revelation; John describes a river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God.^[8] This fountain could be a depiction of that vision with Ocean triumphing over all who oppose him and his never ending flood of justice going before him.^[9]

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On either side of Ocean stand Abundance and Health; they follow behind in his victory. As Jesus, the giver of living water said, "I come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly."^[10] He suffered a tortuous whipping to pay the price for our healing.^[11] The redemption of Christ is not just of spirit in the distant future, but a reclaiming and restoration in the here and now.

The scene is a visual depiction of the power won at the cross and brought onto earth at the resurrection. We read the verses, but do we understand the shaking that went on when the sun went dark and the curtain was rent? The warring horses led by tritons over the tumult of the water echo the sense of that power.

In the middle of the depths of depression, David wrote in Psalm 42 "Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls."^[12] Water speaks to us. Even if we are not looking for God, He speaks to us by water. It brings forth a stillness, a wanting to connect. Before God breathed life into Adam, his spirit hovered over the surface of the water.^[13]

Water is a symbol of life and of new beginnings. Jesus said that whoever believes in him “from his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:38) It is a representation of that life eternal, a wellspring that will never run dry. This magnificent [1] fountain is a physical depiction of the force of that desire. The Trevi Fountain brings a sense of homecoming and a looking forward to full and complete restoration[2] - a day when war has ceased and strife and contention is no more.

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First published in An Unexpected Journal: Courage, Strength, & Hope (2018)

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While the story could have been placed in any tropical island setting, its references are all Hawaiian. Murphy had always felt a special connection to the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow as performed by Israel Kamakawiwo’Ole, also known as the “Voice of Hawaii.”^[1] The inspiration for Lava came to Murphy after visiting Hawaii on a family vacation. He was fascinated by the geological history of the Big Island, which is made up of five volcanoes that have joined together over time. He was particularly intrigued by a diorama of the island depicting “Lo’ihi,” an underwater volcano that will, over time, join the other five volcanoes that make up the Big Island.^[2]

The inspiration of the submerged volcano percolated together with his love for Hawaii for several years until his sister’s wedding. Marrying for the first time at 43, he saw her joy in marrying her love that she had waited for for so long and it brought to his mind Lo’ihi, the submerged volcano waiting to be joined.^[3] This was the seed of the song Lava and the short animated film based upon it.

In the opening scene of the film, we see a male volcano alone in the middle of the sea, surrounded by and supporting animal and marine life . . . all in pairs. He sees the love around him and begins his song reminiscent of the opening lines of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech as well as the lyrics of Somewhere Over the Rainbow:

I have a dream I hope will come true

That you're here with me and I'm here with you

I wish that the earth, sea, the sky up above-a

Will send me someone to lava

Time passes and he keeps singing, holding on to hope. With no evidence or sign that his words are being heard or that there is any point to his song at all, he keeps singing. As the Scriptures say, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”^[4] The volcano’s deferred hope causes his lava to cool and harden until at last he is submerged beneath the sea. It seemed that his story was over and that his song was sung in vain.

Unbeknownst to the male volcano, his song is heard by a female volcano under the sea. She listens to and longs for his song, “knowing it was for her,”^[5] until the time her lava erupts and she rises above the ocean surface . . . at just the moment he sinks behind her. Not seeing him and not knowing what has happened, she picks up his song where he left off and begins to sing. When he hears her singing, his lava is built up again until he erupts above the sea and joins with her.

There are many parallels to the Christian faith.[1] The male volcano had faith that just as all other creatures had a mate, that there must be one for him. As he saw goodness, love, and companionship in all and for all other things, there must be the same for him. He looked for something for which he had no evidence. There was no mate for him in site and he had never seen another of his type. The male volcano had, as the writer of Hebrew explains it, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”^[6]

The volcano’s faith in the coming of an unseen mate echoes God’s instruction throughout the Old Testament to be “strong and courageous” and in the New to “stand firm.” Even when there is no indication to believe otherwise, we are to hold on to the promises of God. In this seven minute film, there is no mention of God; however, the volcano had a belief that there is someone who could and would answer. Just as he was formed, that another like him could be as well.

Lava also illustrates 1 Corinthians 13:8 which states “love never fails.” It could also be a parable with a picture of Hebrews chapter 10 to keep an unwavering hope in God who will be faithful (vs 23) and not to grow faint-hearted but to keep our confident hope (vs 35.)[2] So strong was the volcano’s belief in love and goodness that he continued singing his song to the very end.

But the most powerful illustration is that even when it seems all hope is gone, love wins through the faithfulness of God.[3] The end of the volcano’s story seemed to be one of disappointment, of unfulfilled hope. He believed and sang, but yet he sank alone. Whatever would come seemed to be too late. This is the picture of Abraham and Sarah who, although their bodies were as good as dead^[7], they still believed God would fulfill his promise. It is the story of Esther and Mordecai who put their trust in God even when it seemed like there was no hope to turn the decree of Xerxes. It is the story of the resurrection, where life comes from death and victory from defeat. In each case it seemed the situation was beyond hope, that there was no way, but as with the story of the volcano, there was a new beginning born from what seemed to be the end.

Watching the film for the first time, as the male volcano sank just as the one he was waiting for emerged, my Jewish friend said pessimistically, “That’s just like life.” When he emerged again to join his love I thought, “That’s just like God.”[4]

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First published in An Unexpected Journal: Courage, Strength, and Hope (2018)

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What is At Stake

A half a century ago, Lewis warned his fellow British academics that the acceptance of the ideology in The Green Book would certainly lead to "the destruction of the society which accepts it."[1] His warning was true just as it is true for us in the United States today as the fabric of our nation is dependent upon an educated and engaged populace. As G.K. Chesterton observes in Orthodoxy, the foundation of the democratic process is based on "an attempt to get at the opinion of those who would be too modest to offer it."[2] In a country whose governing institutions are based on the assumption that it is "of the people, for the people, and by the people,"[3] all its people must be capable of participating in charting its course rather than a select few.

The importance of fighting to create a society that agrees on the existence of objective truth is especially true for Christians. We have a Savior who engages and interacts with us through experience in the physical world, but he also calls to us through reason. Christ, as Michael Ward points out in Heresies and How to Avoid Them, is Truth personified.[4] Those who seek Truth seek him. It is hard to witness to the salvation of Christ as Truth if the one to whom we are witnessing has been conditioned in the classroom that there is no truth outside of their own construct of reality. Because of this paradigm shift towards relativism, the dynamics of evangelism have dramatically changed in the past two decades as Nancy Pearcey explains in Saving Leonardo. Rather than demanding evidence for the truth claims of Christianity such as "the existence of God or the deity of Christ or the resurrection," offense is taken that Christians assert that there is any truth at all.[5]

Relativism as Constructivism

The ideology Lewis warned of is widespread in modern education. The idea that truth is subjective has taken form in education as constructivism where the current buzzwords in educational thought include "individualized learning" where students learn in "innovative" ways by "constructing" knowledge[6] based on their existing information frameworks. However, as Barbara Jaworski notes in a review of Constructivism in Education, education does not involve students alone but rather it is "fundamentally about students and teachers and the process of teaching."[7] Pedagogy is a two-way process. Information is transmitted to the student, and the teacher must be able to discern if that information has been received and understood. In his discussion "The Meanings of Truth," Thomas Aquinas reasoned that for a thing to be investigated, there must be absolute truth apart from and outside of the individual and the state of being, otherwise "all science and knowledge of things would perish."[8] Regardless of educational ideology, an effective teacher is one which can both engage the students' interest and modify their teaching to the students' unique needs and learning styles. While both are "student centered," practical constructivism ranges from focusing on the characteristics of all forms of effective teaching which incorporates feedback from the learner and what Aquinas would call the "diverse ways"[9] in which a particular truth can be understood to radical constructivism which operates on the basis that all knowledge is subjective and reality is "objectively unknowable."[10]

The relativist approach to education of constructivism is presented as a novel and forward thinking approach. Rather than being a 21st century innovation, we see Lewis decried it in the mid-twentieth; however, it goes further back than this. Five centuries before the birth of Christ Protagoras made the claim, "man is the center of all things." He believed knowledge was, as Gaius and Titius later claimed in The Green Book, based on the interpretation of the observer. It was this sophistry which Socrates argued against in a dialogue titled Protagoras and strongly refuted. He argued that reality, truth, and principles themselves are objective and absolute. Man's perception can misconceive reality, but it does not change it. Not only does the learner have an obligation to seek the most correct understanding of the truth, but ignorance is equated with evil. This is in opposition to the view of radical constructivism.

Constructivism and the Teacher

While constructivists identify with the Socratic method as it incorporates the same practices of "eliciting relevant preconceptions, clarifying preconceptions, testing one's own hypotheses, and deciding whether to accept the hypotheses or propositions,"[11] the incompatible difference between the Socratic method and radical constructivism is that the former begins with the assumption that there is truth to be found. In the Socratic Method, the learner begins in the position of seeker, one who is searching for the true and who is ready to lay aside previous misconceptions. In radical constructivism, the learner continues to build out their own position regardless of whether or not that position is worthwhile.

The position of a teacher is one who has an understanding of a particular objective truth and whose role is to transmit that truth effectively. However, in an ideology where truth can be constructed and is subjective to the learner's own perspective, the logical conclusion of this position is the elimination of the necessity of a teacher. This is seen in the current educational landscape where constructivism is the foundational mindset, the position of teacher is not only devalued but seen as superfluous. Technology is considered a valid substitute for personal transmission, the focus is on student "outcomes" as data points rather than the enrichment and engagement of a human being, and teachers are seen as nothing more than a distraction from the purpose at hand.[12]

It is not only "individualized learning," but "individualized truth." A student conditioned in constructivism can easily believe that their position is the correct one regardless of all evidence to the contrary because in the constructivist approach, all information is interpreted through their own perceptions and existing knowledge. If one of the common goals of an educational system is to create "global citizens"[13] and "good communicators," a constructivist mindset undermines that goal. A community is that in which individuals come together for a common goal and purpose. Communication is achieved through the transmission of ideas and concepts through agreed upon language. If we cannot begin on common ground and discuss differences of opinion with an assumption that there actually is a point of agreement that can be reached, we condemn ourselves to living on isolated islands either in contention or domination of another. As Lewis notes, "For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please."[14] Citizenship is about community. When we talk about citizenship, it should mean there is a coming together in agreement on certain truths.

The Purpose of Education

When examining which educational approach has the greatest validity, we must first look at the purpose of education itself. The purpose is to teach a person what he should know, to inform where there was once ignorance, and to enlighten what was once dark. Aquinas describes the gaining of knowledge and thus education itself is achieved by the "assimilation of the knower to the thing known."[15] Louis Markos in Restoring Beauty notes that "children need guidance in judging what is right and wrong, wise and foolish, just and unjust."[16] It is not enough to simply have a thought about something. We must have right thoughts about that thing in order to have true understanding. It is very easy to believe that one has knowledge about a particular thing and yet, when all is said and done, miss the point entirely. The more unfamiliar a topic, the more important it is to have a guide, a teacher, to navigate the new terrain of knowledge, one who not only understands the subject matter, but can identify and bridge the gaps in one's own understanding. Who one is taught by can make all the difference.

Isolation in Constructivism

However in a constructivist setting, the student's existing knowledge is given precedence and all new learning must conform to what is already known. Rather than the educational setting being a place where, as Lewis states, students learn and enter into a "little portion of the human heritage,"[17] parts of the greater community, individuals are seen as "shut operational systems, auto-referential."[18] There is no coming together in a community of shared knowledge and understanding, because in constructivism reality is subjective, the individual experience and understanding reigns supreme. The ideology is in complete opposition to what Lewis refers to as the "Tao," which he defines as "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are."[19] Constructivism is the indoctrination of relativism and is based on what Paul Boghossian refers to as "equal validity"[20] of ideas. If we believe all ideas are equally valid, there is no cause to examine our own. Rather than searching for the true, the right, and the best, it instead becomes a war of opposing ideas where whomever can impose "their truth" wins.

An Illustration of the Consequences of Constructivism

While Lewis and Boghossian argue against relativism and the precepts of constructivism philosophically, "The River" by Flannery O'Connor presents a dramatic illustration of the dangerous consequences of learning in an entirely self-referential system. The story begins with a boy, Harry, being given over without handkerchief or breakfast to the care of a Mrs. Connin for the day whom he has never met. Neglectful, his parents were in a habit of handing him from sitter to sitter and so accustomed is he to this sort of treatment, he accepts the state of affairs passively, "like an old sheep waiting to be let out."[21] Harry is an example of a child which, as Lewis describes in The Abolition of Man, needs "to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity."[22]

This excursion begins to awaken Harry's curiosity. It is the start of his educational process. Mrs. Connin, by exposing him to the new experiences of her world, is one who is "irrigating the deserts"[23] of Harry's bleak life as Lewis would say. Harry learns through firsthand experience that pigs were not actually "small fat pink animals with curly tails and round grinning faces and bow ties."[24] He learns from Mrs. Connin that he "had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ"[25] and not, as he previously believed, "a doctor named Shadewell."[26] It was an exciting day for Harry and he discovered "you found out more when you left where you lived."[27]

These new experiences and concepts are completely outside of his previous construct of the world. As Harry and Mrs. Connin walk through the idyllic setting of the red clay highway making its way among the honeysuckle and through the woods to the river to hear a preacher believed by Mrs. Connin to be a healer, Harry, who began the day "bumping his feet together as if he had trouble walking,"[28] begins to "make wild leaps and pull forward . . . as if he wanted to dash off and snatch the sun."[29] His passivity has transformed into active interest. His "desert" has been watered and he is primed for the input of a teacher.

At the river meeting, Harry encounters the earnest young preacher, Bevel, who is intent upon bringing his listeners to the redemption of God. Among their fellow listeners are a woman who claims she saw the preacher heal, even though Bevel stated he had not, and the incongruously named Mr. Paradise, the local skeptic and gas station owner. Each character has their own "construction" of reality: Mrs. Connin with her simple faith; the woman who believes indiscriminately without supporting evidence or testimony; Mr. Paradise who believes nothing; and Bevel the preacher for whom beliefs are all important. There is no mediation between the competing worldviews. In a gathering that is supposed to be about communion, there is none. Each person is occupying the same location; however, there is no agreement. There is no shared truth or coming together because each has constructed their own reality and no one is interested in stepping outside of their creation.

In the middle is the boy, Harry. While Mr. Paradise looks on and mocks, the preacher urges his followers to "lay their pain . . . In the rich red river of Jesus' blood."[30] A river which, as the preacher tells his listeners, "goes on . . . slow to the Kingdom of Christ."[31] At the urging of Mrs. Connin, Harry is baptized by the preacher and realizes that "this was not a joke."[32] He seemed to have stepped into the real world, one that was solid and with meaning. He had come from a world where he was discarded to one where, as the preacher assured him, he counts. This flood of new information is overwhelming to him. Nothing in his life before has prepared him, he has no framework through which to process these new ideas. He came from a home where everything, including himself, was a joke, to one where words and actions are of utmost importance. He went from one where life was superficial and pedantic to one where transcendent truths are presented in metaphor. Lewis states, the "right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments"[33] but because Harry has never been taught right from wrong or what matters from what is irrelevant, he is left without grounding. He is both without his own discernment and without a discerning guide.

He is takes information and interprets it based on his previous experiences and knowledge, which was limited. As Mortimer Adler points out in How to Read a Book, "Thinking is only one part of the activity of learning. One must also use one's senses and imagination. One must observe, and remember, and construct imaginatively what cannot be observed."[34] Harry does this in spades; however, learning is just one part of the educational process. The second part, the teacher, is just as important as the recipient of the instruction. His mind went from a parched desert to a wild "jungle"[35] sprouted from the seeds planted by all of these competing ideas. It is a learning completely unguided, without pruning or training by an experienced hand. His self-guided synthesis of these various presentations of truths results in a fatal outcome.

"The River" ends with the death of Harry. Back with his parents in his home of neglect, Harry decides to return to the river . . . alone. Remembering the preacher's words that the river led to the Kingdom of Christ, a place where he counts, he finds his way back to the place where the door to this new world had opened and he "intended not to fool with preachers any more but to baptize himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river. He didn't mean to waste any more time."[36] Eschewing a guide completely and confident in his own interpretation, he threw himself into the river determined to reach his destination, leaving Mr. Paradise arriving too late to save him, "staring with his dull eyes, as far down the river line as he could see."[37]

The Falsity of Constructivism

Harry's belief that he could ride the river to the Kingdom of Christ as he would a train to a stop did not make it true. There was objective truth that he missed. In our post-modern society, we hesitate to speak in absolutes, but as Pearcey writes,

. . . To say that something is objective does not mean that everyone agrees, or that you know it for certain. It only means that it is capable of being true or false. If you are working on a complex mathematics problem you may not be certain you have the right answer. But you are certain that there is a right answer, not merely personal preference.[38]

Fundamentally, we all know this to be true. We take jobs and enter into contracts based on the confident understanding that all parties agree that an hourly rate is based on an hour that is made up of 60 minutes and 360 seconds paid for with dollars that are the equivalent of 100 U.S. cents. When a student studies medicine, her future patients are not interested at all in what that would-be doctor's "perception" is about human anatomy, the patient wants to know that the person who holds their life in her hands has been trained and educated according to the latest and best medical practices. There is a universal standard to be upheld.

Fragmentation versus Integration

O'Connor's Harry is a little boy without guidance or training. He finds himself in a community which is populated by those who are more than ready to share their own beliefs, but yet are unconcerned with the impact those beliefs have on those around them. Some of the beliefs were true; however, they were transmitted without regard for how the hearer received them. Quoting Catholic philosopher Louis Deupre, Pearcey writes,

The central challenge of our age . . . is the lack of any integrating truth. "We experience our culture as fragmented; we live on bits of meaning and lack the overall vision that holds them together in a whole." As a result, people feel an intense need for self-integration.[39]

It was this search for self-integration, for meaning, and his role in it which Harry sought when he immersed himself in the river. He had caught a glimpse of part and was searching for the whole.

To Love Truth

"Listen, said the White Spirit, " Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again, even now." [40]
- C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Childhood is a time of inquiry, of exploration, and of growing into knowledge. The goal of education, whether the person is to become a plumber or a physicist, should above all teach the student how to recognize truth along with equip them with the tools to discover those truths. Radical constructivism is an enemy to that endeavor poisoning the wellspring of inquiry. To the question so famously asked by Pontius Pilate so long ago, "What is truth?" constructivism answers "Whatever you want it to be." Nothing can stand upon the shifting foundation of the constructivist, not an educational system, not a society, nor a faith. We must agree that there is truth that is beyond us as individuals which we can be united in agreement when it is reached.

First published in An Unexpected Journal: The Abolition of Man (2018)

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MORPHEUS

Do you want to know what it is, Neo?

It's that feeling you have had all

your life.  That feeling that

something was wrong with the

world.  You don't know what it is

but it's there, like a splinter in

your mind, driving you mad,

driving you to me.  But what is it?

In an unnamed future, Neo, a computer programmer by day and hacker by night, goes through the monotony of what he believes to be the grind of his day-to-day existence looking for meaning. Prompted by the sense of an elusive “other,” of something beyond the world in front of him, he searches lines of code hoping to find the answer.

He believes the answer to be centered in a person called Morpheus, an elusive legend, a phantom voice whispered among the internet underground who is believed to have the answers to a greater system called “The Matrix.” The day comes when Neo is called by Morpheus, called out of his mundane existence and given the opportunity to discover “the truth,” to see the world as it really is. Neo discovers what he believed to be reality was nothing but a facade designed to placate and control. Rather than an autonomous agent, he has been nothing more than property, a resource, for a merciless controller. The Matrix highlights the questions of both ethics and imaging.

MORPHEUS

This is your last chance.  After

this, there is no going back.

You take the blue pill and the

story ends.  You wake in your bed

and you believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill and you stay

in Wonderland and I show you how

deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Remember that all I am offering is

the truth.  Nothing more

When Neo first encounters Morpheus, for whom he has been looking for so long, Neo is presented with a choice in the form of two pills: a blue pill and a red pill. Choosing the red pill, Neo sees the unvarnished truth of the world as it actually was. Take the blue, and he continues life as he always had.  As Neo reaches for the red pill, Morpheus warns “Remember, all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.a’^[1]

The red pill activates a trace program and Neo discovers that he, as himself, is not actually what he believed himself to be. Rather than a maverick anti-authority computer programmer chasing the limits of the network and bending it to his will, he was in truth a slave to it. The idea he had of himself was a product of a virtual reality system, a “neural interactive simulation,” that controlled every area of his perception. In truth, he was a prisoner trapped in a pod among a field of countless other humans all being harvested for energy to fuel the artificial intelligence that controlled the matrix.

The year was not actually 1997 as Neo believed, but 2197 . . .  as far as they knew. The exact details of human history had been destroyed along with the earth in the battle between humans and AI. As Morpheus explained,  “It started early in the twenty-first century, with the birth of artificial intelligence, a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.”^[2] This new race wanted the same treatment as humans, at first, the same “inalienable rights,” but “whatever they were given, it was never enough.”

Imago Dei vs Imago Hominis

The relationship between God and man begins with the words in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our own image.” It is this connection that begets the relationship which fuels the desire for a connection with the one we image, as the writer of Ecclesiastes states, “God put eternity into the hearts of man.”^[3] It is this imaging that gives us this idea of goodness, of right, and that there is a particular way things should be even though they aren’t, or as Morpheus put it, “that something was wrong with the world.” Why should we think that if corruption, brutality, and exploitation has always been part of the world? How in heavens can we have any expectation of something else unless it is heaven itself that gives us this idea.

This certainty that there is a “should be” is what Thomas Aquinas refers to as the “argument from degree” or a “gradation of being” in his five ways to know God.^[4]  As each of us is created in the image of God, we have an inner knowing of what is true, beautiful, and right. The fact that we all have an idea, an inner conviction, that a thing “should be” a certain way indicates that there is an ideal to be measured up to. When an artist paints a picture of a person, the way we determine if it is “good” or not is by how well it resembles the person, either in depicting the person exactly or by highlighting a characteristic or trait of the individual.  In the same way, a reproduction of a painting is considered to be “good” by how closely it resembles the author's original style and form. 

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In the same way, Aquinas’s Fourth Way states that we can know the evidence of God because we recognize that there is something that is the standard of perfection.  Aquinas’s definition of good in “On Goodness and the Goodness of God” is something that is “properly actual.”^[5]  For example, if we were to paint a reproduction of Van Gogh’s  “Starry Night,” we compare it to the original to say whether it is “good” or not.  Aquinas states that we can know there is an actual original that our definition of personal good is based upon.  In terms of both things and actions, what is good is defined in terms of relation to the ultimate act or being.  This good and bad, more and less like, is referred to as a “gradation of being” in Aquinas’s Fourth Way.^[6]  Good refers to the perfected, everything else is an approximation or shadow.  As Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is the cause of all the imitations and it is the most, the ultimate, and the perfected; God is the ultimate to which likenesses are compared. 

“Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh

This idea that not only is there an objective “right” but one that all should work towards is something C.S. Lewis identified as universal across all cultures which he labeled as the “Tao” or “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”^[7] While the idea of a good and a perfection that we should all be seeking is a universal desire, the idea of good gods is not. As Thomas Weinandy explains in his essay, “Irenaneus and the Imago Dei,” “Within classical paganism, it was the gods who were modeled after the image and likeness of men and women and, in so being depicted, they possessed all of the foibles, weaknesses, and vices that human beings possess.^[8] “ As ancient humans created gods in their own image, so do modern humans create AI in the world of The Matrix.

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But what happens to the Imager when the Image is flawed? As Louis Markos writes in Apologetics for the 21st Century

Only a God who is separate from his creation can function as the Guide and Embodiment of pure moral goodness.  If pantheism is correct and God is indistinguishable from his creation, then he can neither be good nor evil--he can only be an amoral spiritual force. In pantheistic religions, the gods do not live outside time and space but are themselves born out of the primal (material) chaos, they do not embody either a holy or universal standard and thus cannot serve as the source of our idea of the good.^[9]

In other words, there is no good without God and there is nothing to have mercy towards.  A being can be no better than the one who formed it, and the AI of the Matrix could be no better than the humans that developed its logic and code. Flawed human values would be its values. The human’s moral imperative, its imperative. As we see, the AI race followed in the footsteps of its makers exactly, whatever they were given … it was “never enough.”

The crux of the dilemma in The Matrix spotlights the failings of the values of Western society. Judeo-Christian values spawned the idea of individual rights that are equal to all.^[10] This equality of persons is also not something common to all historical human experience or in all religions.^[11] Buddhism teaches that there are levels of enlightenment, and one is condemned to repeat their life lesson until that lesson is learned.^[12] A stratification of society is embedded into Hinduism with the varnas or castes.^[13] But this specialness of not only the human race, but the preciousness of the individual sparkles like gemstones throughout the pages of the Hebrew scriptures. God cares about man himself.^[14] God tabernacles among man and man images God himself.^[15] It is this last statement that guarantees value to every man.

But in the move from looking to God as the source of the image to man as the source, the humanists of the Enlightenment left God and focused on man alone. Without God as the grounding, the individual man is left as supreme authority, and as Lewis warns, without that Divine grounding, there is nothing in man to check himself. The grounding Good is removed and man’s own wants and desires are seen as the ultimate goal.

The desire to seek remains, but when there is nothing left but man, something must still be sought, leaving man to seek things. This is the fruit of the Enlightenment and it is this avaricious seeking we see in the writings of John Locke that so influenced the foundation of the United States. The goals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” draw strongly from Locke’s Two Treatises on Government.^[16] Locke argues for autonomy of the individual and the idea of a right that transcends temporal powers.^[17] He justified the upending of monarchies that did not have the welfare of citizens as the highest good; believing that when they abdicated their responsibility to their citizens, they also abdicated their authority.^[18] Locke is often considered as the instigator of the American Revolution.^[19] It was on the basis of his writings that colonists not only saw their move towards self-determination as justified, but even a moral imperative.^[20]

John Locke (1632-1704)

However, it is also in the words of Locke that slavery and viewing humans as property – of “things” to be used and disposed of at will.^[21] He writes at length at the dominion over the earth, the “things,” as God-given, and not to a particular man or a particular group, but to all men.^[22] All, but not quite all.

Locke saw property rights as the greatest good. If the motto of the new nation was “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” according to Locke, that happiness was found in things. The message of Two Treatises is that life is about having the liberty to pursue one’s own happiness by obtaining property . . . even at the expense of another’s liberty.^[23] Locke believed in self determination, but not for all. He justified slavery arguing that the slave had forfeited his freedom and that all he argued for did not apply to the slave.^[24]

The Matrix, set in the U.S. with its ideological foundations of obtaining at any cost, is a natural end to this individualistic mindset. It was just as C.S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man, “But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.^[25]” There came a time when the interests of the human and AI races clashed. When the offspring of the human race became too much of a threat, humans tried to annihilate their creation by destroying the sun. In a move worthy of the race they imaged, AI reflected human ingenuity finding a new source for survival enslaving and feeding off the humans who made them. AI rejected and abused their makers, just as humans rejected and killed their Source.^[26]

“Protectors of our Industries” Published in Puck (1883). From Bowdoin University, “This image captures the public’s frustration with the parasitic power dynamic between the industrial giants and the working class.” Read more.

Ethical Grounding and Society

When property becomes the prime directive, ethics become relative. In a study on ethical ideologies, D.R. Forsyth notes that as an individual’s income increased they tended to become “situationalists;” they believe that there is right and wrong, but do not accept a universal right.^[27] The implication is that while they may very strongly believe that there is a right, without an absolute standard of rightness outside of themselves, their “right” becomes centered in themselves. This becomes a conflict for society as a whole when a particular person or group has the power to preserve their rights at the expense of others.  As theologian John Stott observes, "Nearly all legislation has grown up because human beings cannot be trusted to settle their own disputes with justice and without self-interest."^[28] Without a grounding in an absolutely just Good, we are left to the will of those who can control the most. As the hrossa in Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis note on the futility of trying to live without a Lawgiver. “They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair—or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it—like a female trying to beget young on herself.”^[29] We cannot give what we do not have. The greedy cannot give equity. The exploiters cannot give justice. Without a Great Good, an “I AM,” we are, like the humans of the matrix, left to the mercy of whoever is willing to be the most ruthless.

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Ethics as a Path to True Purpose

The heritage of Locke is one centered on acquisition, domination, and things. However, this is not the sole heritage the U.S. can claim. Before John Locke, there was John Winthrop. He and his fellow colonists were equally concerned about freedom: but it was not the freedom to acquire, but the freedom of worship. A Puritan who had experienced the Divine Presence, his exodus to what he saw as a new promised land was prompted by religious persecution under Charles I. This desire to seek God without coercion or control was Winthrop’s motivating force.^[30]  He believed prosperity — the things — would be there for them, but as a side effect, a benefit, of the obedience to and relationship with God.^[31] Winthrop’s vision can also be seen in the American dream of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” however, in his view the goal was not things, the goal was God.

“America, the City on a Hill and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Read on Raised to Walk

The entirety of U.S. history can be seen as a battle between these two visions of Locke and Winthrop: brotherhood versus domination, mammon versus self-sacrifice, and man’s good versus the Good of God. The desire for acquisition, the “never enough,” can be seen behind every area of civil strife in the nation: the genocide against the indigenous peoples, the stain of slavery and the still gaping wound of the Civil War, the financial collapses from the 19th century to the present caused by speculators, and the current exploitation by inhuman corporations extracting the life-blood of the masses. The image of a sea of captive humans with their life force being leached from them until they had no value to the matrix is shocking. But it is shocking that an inhuman entity would do to humans what humans do to each other? The Imager can be no better than the Image. The Matrix imagines a logical end to unscrupulous human beings dominated by their own merciless creation.

A political cartoon by Thomas Nast published by Harper’s Weekly (1871) mocking political boss and corrupt industrialist, William M. Tweed, also known as “Boss Tweed.” Read how Nast helped bring Tweed to justice through his biting art. More political cartoons from the Gilded Age.

Breaking the Matrix

CYPHER

Just between you and me, you don't

believe it, do you?  You don't

believe this guy is the one?

TRINITY

I think Morpheus believes he is.

CYPHER

I know.  But what about you?

TRINITY

I think Morpheus knows things that

I don't.

CYPHER

Yeah, but if he's wrong —

The human race, both those plugged in and unaware as well as those fighting it, are trapped in a prison of their own devising. But in this humanistic dystopia, the gleam of “other” shines through. There is a prophecy of “The One” who will break the power of the matrix and free the human race. They will be able to live in the city of Zion in peace. It is based on this promise that Morpheus calls out Neo from his bondage within the matrix. He believes Neo is the One so strongly that he is willing to sacrifice his own life to save Neo’s.  This Messianic theme is so evident, moviegoers have remarked, “When I was watching the film, I kept getting Messianic feels, like how someone is destined to swoop in and save everyone.”^[32]

The ending is also Messianic — Christlike — a sacrificial death, a resurrection through the power of love, and an overcoming so complete of the Agents of the matrix in a scene reminiscent of the Harrowing of Hell, that the matrix loses all power over Neo. In a sense, “all authority” has been given to Neo, both in the matrix and without.^[33]

After the Breaking: The New Beginning

One has to wonder if Neo is successful in dismantling the matrix, what is next? If the AI overlords are defeated, will the human race fare any better? It seems the Watchowski’s did not have an answer to that question either. Matrix Reloaded (2003) and Matrix Revolution (2003) descend into nihilism with the enemy losing its teeth, the hero his purpose, and the viewers the end vision of true deliverance.^[34] When there is nothing outside of the world, there is nothing but the world to look to. There is no escape and nowhere to go and so the Watchowskis’ reboot to the beginning. For all its Messianic beginnings, the trilogy ends in Buddhist purposelessness. What was the meaning of it all if it all ends as it began?

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The Matrix can show us the danger of a relativistic worldview giving warning of where our avaricious path may lead, but it cannot give us a vision of hope. For that we must look to the One who is “the Son of God, this the Only-begotten, this the Former of all things, this the true Light who enlighteneth every man, this the Creator of the world, this He that came to His own, this He that became flesh and dwelt among us”^[35] Like Neo who overcame the hold of the matrix, Jesus became one of us to break the hold of our own matrix, the power of sin.^[36]

Await Him that is above every season, the Eternal, the Invisible, who became visible for our sake, the Impalpable, the Impassible, who suffered for our sake, who endured in all ways for our sake.^[37] - Ignatius of Antioch

About “Ethics of the Matrix”

An edited version of this essay was published in the Summer 2020 issue of An Unexpected Journal: Science Fiction. We had to fill a gap in the issue in a short amount of time, so I wrote it in a hurry. There was pushback on the section on Locke and capitalism. The editor’s comment was that “Locke was more nuanced.” We didn’t have time to work through the section, so it was cut.

I still have the same opinion today that I did four years ago and so I’m publishing the original, unedited version of the essay here. I did go back and add footnotes to the section on Locke, but other than that, this is the raw version.

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Recommended Resources

Movies

• The Matrix (1999)

• Matrix Reloaded (2003)

• Matrix Revolution (2003)

On Humanity

• The Abolition of Man (1943) by C.S. Lewis

• After Humanity (2021) by Michael Ward

• Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings (1999) by Penguin Classics

• Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. Volume 6, Number 4, Fall 2003 This article quotes from "St. Irenaeus and the Imago Dei: The Importance of Being Human;" However, there are a number of articles in the issue that deal with humanity and personhood.

• Apologetics for the 21st Century (2010) by Louis Markos

• NLT Life Application Study Bible

• Basic Christianity by John Stott

• Out of the Silent Planet (1938) by C.S. Lewis

On American History & Ideology

• Two Treatises on Government (1689) by John Locke

• "The Role of Christian Belief in Public Policy" (2007) by Robert D. Orr

• "Consumer Ethics: The Role of Religiosity" by Scott J. Vitell and Joseph G. P. Paolillo

• "Consumers' Ethical Beliefs: The Roles of Money, Religiosity and Attitude toward Business" (2007) by Scott John Vitell, Jatinder J. Singh, and Joseph Paolillo

• "The Political Cartoonist Who Helped Lead to ‘Boss’ Tweed’s Downfall" (2022) by Dave Roos - Thomas Nast gleefully mocked the Tammany Hall boss in multiple cartoons, prompting newspapers and authorities to investigate.

• "Gilded Age Political Cartoons" (2020) by Casey Goldberg, Bowdoin University

• "The Art of the Fat Cat" (2014) by Matt Wuerker, Politico Magazine

• “America: The City on a Hill and the Pursuit of Happiness” (2020) by Carla Alvarez

^[1]  Wachowski, Andy, Larry Wachowski, Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Moss. The Matrix. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1999.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ecclesiastes 3:11

^[4] Thomas Aquinas, Trans. Ralph McInery. “On Goodness and the Goodness of God,” in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1999) 345.

^[5]  Ibid. 5.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943; repr. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001) 18.

^[8] Thomas G. Weinandy, “St. Irenaeus and the Imago Dei: The Importance of Being Human,” Logos 6, no. 4 (2003): 16.

^[9] Louis Markos.  Apologetics for the 21st Century.  (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010) 33.

^[10]  Robert D. Orr, “The Role of Christian Belief in Public Policy,” Christian Bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality 13, no. 2 (2007).In a discussion on human rights and public policy, Orr notes that in a discussion among those who held orthodox views from the Abrahamic religions that "a foundational belief in the sovereignty of God and the sanctity of human life based on the imago Dei was clear in all three faith traditions, and this led to very similar positions on matters of public policy."

^[11]  “Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond,” The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, last modified 2007, accessed June 6, 2020,https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/symposia/religion-and-power-divine-kingship-ancient-world-and-beyond-0.At the 2007 symposium of The Oriental institute of the University of Chicago, scholars examined the “near universal” belief among ancient cultures of kingship tied to divinity. There was a built-in stratification of society where some were “more” (the kings ruling by divine right) and others much less.

^[12]  Dale Debakcsy.  “The dark side of Buddhism.” New Humanist. Published January 23, 2013. Accessed March 5, 2016. https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4021/the-dark-side-of-buddhismAn account from an atheist on teaching at a Buddhist school on the psychological impact of karma. "At first glance, karma is a lovely idea which encourages people to be good even when nobody is watching for the sake of happiness in a future life. It's a bit carrot-and-stickish, but so are a lot of the ways in which we get people to not routinely beat us up and take our stuff. Where it gets insidious is in the pall that it casts over our failures in this life. I remember one student who was having problems memorising material for tests. Distraught, she went to the monks who explained to her that she was having such trouble now because, in a past life, she was a murderous dictator who burned books, and so now, in this life, she is doomed to forever be learning challenged. Not, "Oh, let's look at changing your study habits", but rather, "Oh, well, that's because you have the soul of a book-burning murderer. "To our ears, this sounds so over the top that it is almost amusing, but to a kid who earnestly believes that these monks have hidden knowledge of the karmic cycle, it is devastating. She was convinced that her soul was polluted and irretrievably flawed, and that nothing she could do would allow her to ever learn like the people around her. And this is the dark side of karma – instead of misfortunes in life being bad things that happen to you, they are manifestations of a deep and fundamental wrongness within you. Children have a hard enough time keeping up their self-esteem as it is without every botched homework being a sign of lurking inner evil."

^[13]  Jayaram V, “The Hindu Varna System,” Hindu Web, accessed June 6, 2020, https://www.hinduwebsite.com/hinduism/concepts/varna.asp.“The Vedic society in the early days of its formation had four Varnas namely Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Shudras. They were not equal in status, although created by the same source, but part of a krama or order. Brahmanas occupied the highest position, as gods upon earth. Except in certain Vedic rituals, where they had to sit below the king, their position in society was unassailable. Kshatriyas were next. They had the right to claim the authority of God to rule upon earth as his representatives and enforce laws. Vaishyas came later, and Shudras were the last.”

^[14]  Psalm 8:3-4 NIV

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?

^[15]  John 1:14 TLV: And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. We looked upon His glory, the glory of the one and only from the Father, full of grace and truth.Ephesians 2:10 NLT

For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.

^[16] John Locke, Two Treatises on Government. II.6. "The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure." 

^[17] Ibid., VI.21. Locke's assertion of man's absolute right to self-determination is a foundation of modern libertarianism. "The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of Nature for his rule. The liberty of man in society is to be under no other legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth, nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact according to the trust put in it. Freedom, then, is not what Sir Robert Filmer tells us: 'A liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws'; but freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it. A liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of Nature." 

^[18] Ibid., VII.21. Locke's assertion of man's absolute right to  self-determination is a foundation of modern libertarianism. "Wherever, therefore, any number of men so unite into one society as to quit every one his executive power of the law of Nature, and to resign it to the public, there and there only is a political or civil society. .. And hence it is evident that absolute monarchy, which by some men is counted for the only government in the world, is indeed inconsistent with civil society, and so can be not form of civil government at all." 

^[19] Joseph Loconte, “1776: A Lockean Revolution,” National Review, July 4, 2021, accessed November 16, 2024. https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/1776-a-lockean-revolution/.

^[20] Locke, Two Treatises. II.8, 13. A large portion of Two Treatises is a discussion on the Natural or Moral law applied to society and civil government. in Chapter 2, section 13, Locke argues that an absolute monarch that violates the natural law is no better than that a criminal and "the state of Nature is therefore not to be endured." In a previous section (II.8) Locke states that "every man hath a right to punish the offender, and be executioner of the law of Nature" and that executing justice is an obligation to God. Locke is not advocating for vigilante justice; however, he does insist that justice must be found in society.

^[21] Ibid., II.6.

^[22] Ibid.,. I.2. Two Treatises on Government is a thought exercise of political power and what grounds that power. Is power authorized in the law of the land or is there a greater power and greater rule of law to which laws of all lands must conform? Reading through Two Treatise, Locke does argue for a moral law and provides a foundation for a "righteous revolution" in cases where men are treated unjustly by absolute monarchs. The phrase "absolute dominion" is found eleven times in the text. Locke believed the individual had absolute dominion over most things. He was a man of democracy and of equality. However, as you read through the text, I think you will also find that this equality did not extend to everyone in Locke's mind. His "all are equal" is not all of humanity, it is certain classes of people. Slaves and women are not included in Locke's "all." There is much good thought in Two Treatises; however, within it also are the seeds of the inequity that we still battle in the U.S. today. "I think it may not be amiss to set down what I take to be political power. That the power of a magistrate over a subject may be distinguished from that of a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave."

^[23]  Ibid., II.6.

^[24] Ibid., VII.85. "But there is another sort of servant which by a peculiar name we call slaves, who being captives taken in a just war are, by the right of Nature, subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters. These men having, as I say, forfeited their lives and, with it, their liberties, and lost their estates, and being in the state of slavery, not capable of any property, cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil society, the chief end whereof is the preservation of property." 

^[25] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 69.

^[26] Isaiah 53:3-5 NIV

3 He was despised and rejected by mankind,

    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces

    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

4 Surely he took up our pain

    and bore our suffering,

yet we considered him punished by God,

    stricken by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,

    he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

    and by his wounds we are healed.

^[27] Scott J. Vitell and Joseph G. P. Paolillo, “Consumer Ethics: The Role of Religiosity,” Journal of Business Ethics 46, no. 2 (2003): 158.

^[28] John R.W. Stott.  Basic Christianity. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co, 1958.) 61

^[29] C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, Space Trilogy, Book One edition. (1938, repr. New York, NY: Scribner, 2002) 102.

^[30] Jeremiah 29:11-13 NIV

11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

^[31] John Winthrop, “‘City on a Hill’ Sermon,” last modified 1630, accessed March 31, 2020, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-tc3-ushistory1os/chapter/primary-source-john-winthrop-dreams-of-a-city-on-a-hill-1630/.

Winthrop’s belief in what was required for the new nation to prosper:

“Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.”

^[32] Veronica Kordmany, “The Secret Jewish History of The Matrix,” Hillel International, last modified December 19, 2019, accessed March 31, 2020, https://www.hillel.org/about/news-views/news-views---blog/news-and-views/2019/12/19/the-secret-jewish-history-of-the-matrix.

^[33] Psalm 110:1 NIV

The Lord says to my lord:

“Sit at my right hand

    until I make your enemies

    a footstool for your feet.”

Isaiah 9:6 NIV

For to us a child is born,

    to us a son is given,

    and the government will be on his shoulders.

And he will be called

    Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

1 Corinthians 15:20-25 NIV

20 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23 But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. 24 Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For he “has put everything under his feet.”

^[34] Derek Draven, “10 Reasons Why The Matrix Revolutions Disappointed Fans,” ScreenRant, last modified March 16, 2020, accessed June 6, 2020, https://screenrant.com/why-matrix-revolutions-disappointed/.

^[35] Irenaeus, Against Heresies 9.2 (ANF 1).

^[36] Deuteronomy 18:15 NASB

“The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him."

Isaiah 43:11 NASB

“I, even I, am the Lord,

And there is no savior besides Me."

Hebrews 2:14-15 NASB

14 Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.

^[37] Ignatius, Ignatius to Polycarp 3.2 (ANF 1).

Photo taken on Friday, September 27th, of the vendor performance report on the Texas Smart Buy website for a purchase order issued by the Texas Department of Health & Human Services to Workquest on June 24, 2024 . The performance report was submitted on September 5, 2024. Link to a PDF of the performance report as it was when I discovered it.

This is a reposting of the article on my site, “$35 Billion in Pens.” Posting here because even though it is served through Cloudflare, the site is continually hit with DDoS attacks resulting in 503 errors.

Texas and Money

The Texas Department of Health & Human Services spent $35 billion to WorkQuest for “pens/erasable markers” this year. This was in addition to a purchase order for $32 billion for “printers and printer supplies” to the same company in October of 2023.

Photo taken Friday, September 27th, of the $35 billion contract amount in the long list of contracts with WorkQuest. It’s kind of hard to miss that one.

Late last year, I ID’d activities of sock puppet networks online. I realize that there are many marketing/social media agencies that just do business this way. Personally, I think that it is extremely deceptive. Beyond being misleading to clients, the stock puppets steal words, ideas, and stories from actual people and claim them as their own and the client’s account will end up getting burned for any natural and organic engagement.

However, the activities I saw these sock puppet networks engaged in went far beyond being unethical, there were many, many clearly illegal things going on.1 It was a criminal syndicate. I started calling the sock puppets out, I began getting hacked. (I also wrote a letter to the Humble ISD school board against chaplains in public schools and sent it to all 150 representatives in the Texas legislature at the end of December.)2

The hacking, attempts to locate me, and harassment on social media by floating targeted posts across my feed (see my first video in the hacked series for a description) continued, but I didn’t think I had anything concrete that I could go to authorities about. 

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In April, I had definite evidence of hacking of my laptop. I called the FBI, they told me to call the local police and file a report. I called the police, they told me it sounded like a virus (it very obviously wasn’t), dismissed it, and told me to call GeekSquad.

After I made the call to the FBI, the attacks intensified when the criminals realized authorities weren’t going to do anything.

A month later, in May, we discovered evidence of a bootleg listing of the Dostoevsky issue of An Unexpected Journal (I have since resigned from the board and withdrawn my association).3 The thieves were not using an Amazon ISBN that KDP provides for self-publishing. It seemed to me that it would be a simple thing to track down who the ISBN was issued to at Bowker and whose financial information was on the account at Amazon.

Again, I called the FBI. In addition to the cyberstalking, online harassment, and hacking, there was now a clear cut instance of intellectual property theft. The agent told me to file a report on IC3. I also went into the local police department and reported the IP theft and fraud to an officer. I wanted him to see what was happening in person. He advised me to get the listing removed to “stop the bleed” and then pursue whatever remedies were available afterward.

As someone had told me that the FBI won’t bother with hacking and online fraud that involve low dollar amounts, I spent the next two months documenting all of the fraudulent activities I had seen the sock puppet networks engage in as well as outlining different ways the mass of sock puppet accounts manipulating the algorithm could be used to target, defraud and exploit people. I knew that attacking me was not the only thing the people behind the hacking were doing.

The report ended up being 30,000 words and 198 pages including 100 pages of exhibits with screenshots illustrating what I was seeing. I submitted it to tips.fbi.gov and Ic3.org. I also submitted a complaint to the Department of Justice as I was certain that the continual dismissal of my complaint in spite of flagrant and obvious offenses was because I am a woman with a Hispanic last name.

I submitted the report on July 28, 2024.

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As of today [September 28th], I have yet to receive a single response or even acknowledgement from the FBI. The only response I received was a form letter from the Department of Justice saying they were dismissing the complaint without any investigation. The same thing happened after the July submission that happened in April, once the criminals knew that authorities weren’t going to do anything, the attacks got exponentially worse.

The next day, July 29th, began the next level of discovery.

Systematized Intellectual Property Theft

I came across a major Christian platform that had multiple devotional series that looked like they were spun versions of the devotional I published in 2019, #NoFear. They had reflections that used the exact words of my prayer in my live Bible studies.

Recognizing sock puppet activity in a Facebook group for Christian book reviews, I came across a site they were promoting that looked like they were attempting to clone An Unexpected Journal and as well as take over the name recognition of a long-running site of someone I knew that had let the site go because it had continually been hacked in the last year they were running it (sabotage is a continual theme in all of this). On this doppleganger site, I recognized the plagiarized work of people I knew.

This was just the beginning. I continued to find site after site and social media profile after social media profile using plagiarized words of either myself or people I knew. I edited for six years for An Unexpected Journal and I’ve edited a lot of writers. Our work had been stolen by either lazy ghostwriters or used to train an AI model, likely both.

This first week in August was also when I began to realize that the people behind the theft and attacks weren’t just nameless people on the internet, but people I knew.

Discovery Timeline

On August 4th, I did a three hour livestream explaining what was going on and how the sock puppet networks were operating.4

On August 5th, my Facebook login was suspended. When I was finally able to log back in, I could tell they had hacked my accounts. I also reformatted my phone. This was a big mistake as I am fairly certain that reinstallation was a corrupted operating system. All of the main Google apps were weird. This is a Google Pixel phone on the T-Mobile network. They were hacking through Google log-ins.5 Any time I would log in, it would prompt two one-time passwords so the hacker could log in as well.

On August 7th, I went back into the local police department as my phone was completely compromised. I wanted to make a report. I spoke to the same officer that I spoke to in May. His demeanor was completely different, condescending and dismissive. He told me hacking wasn’t a crime; that what I experienced wasn’t reality; and that I needed mental help. He was on crutches.6

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In the report submitted to the FBI, I said he was the only person who had been helpful so far. I think the people targeting me read the report and threatened him. I think that either the FBI submission sites are either completely insecure or there are people on the take in the FBI that gave them the information. That is the only explanation for a police officer to say such a blazingly flagrant lie that hacking isn’t a crime.

The month of August was spent securing my accounts and trying to get my laptop to function. I reformatted the laptop, wiping all the data. If it was a software issue, this should have taken care of the problem. It did not. Even without accessing the internet, they were able to hack and crash my laptop, which is why I think they are using my laptop identifier to hack.

It was one thing after another. There are updates in the Hacked saga as I came across new information.7

I could tell that whoever was running the the sock puppet accounts promoting the Texas Parks Department was involved in siphoning off what I published (one of them used an experience I shared on Facebook at a Texas park in their updates). I knew some of the people involved and I was fairly certain they were running a content/PR agency using stolen content and faked engagement, but I didn’t know the agency name they were operating under.

As some of their clients are public agencies, I knew I could submit a FOIA request for that information. But if you’ve ever actually submitted a FOIA request, especially in Texas, they seem to do everything they can to delay or avoid fulfilling your request entirely.

If a vendor had won a contract for social media/PR services, that information should be publicly available on the Texas Smart Buy site.8 I searched for contracts using every single NIGP code that was related to communication, advertising, and digital media.9 No contracts came up. (I also discovered that even in the use of these codes, someone in Texas is making money.)10

Then I just started scrolling through the contracts awarded to different vendors that the Texas Parks Department worked with, one of which is WorkQuest.11 Workquest also provides services for a number of Texas agencies.

That is when I stumbled across the performance report for a P.O. for $35 billion in pens issued by the Texas Department of Health and Human Services to WorkQuest on June 25, 2024. There was no way to miss it. I found a second performance report for another P.O. issued on October 4, 2023. Both of the performance reports were submitted on September 5, 2024.

I did a livestream about this on Saturday, September 28th.12 By Tuesday, October 1st, those purchase orders had been edited to more reasonable amounts.

https://youtube.com/live/36i3WXnJmgQ

How Does This Happen?

But the question still remains … how in the hell does not one, but two, purchase orders/vendor performance reports for such outrageous amounts get overlooked?

Isn’t there some sort of reconciliation that happens? Does no one review this? Because even without any auditing or oversight on the part of the State of Texas, someone at WorkQuest should have noticed the error … if it was an error.

The amounts of the P.O.’s in the performance reports have since been edited, but the fact that the digital record was edited does not change the fact that the report was to give an account of actual money that was spent. The digital record is supposed to be a reflection of reality. The original number was either wrong when it was submitted or the edited numbers are wrong now.

In my mind, two purchase orders totaling $67 billion raise questions about financial oversight and auditing in the State of Texas. I wasn’t looking for those particular purchase orders, they just stood out because all those numbers were wrapping in the column for contact amount.

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Money is math. How did a reconciliation not catch those grossly out-of-balance amounts? What is the review process, both on the part of the State of Texas and WorkQuest, that no one noticed performance reports for such crazy amounts?

As a friend pointed out, $32 billion, the amount of the purchase order issued on October 4, 2023, is the amount of the Texas budget surplus in the last legislative session that Greg Abbott is withholding from Texas schools.

My Thoughts

These are my thoughts about those two purchase orders. Texas has a $32 billion surplus13 from the last Texas biennial budget that Greg Abbott has been withholding from Texas schools in a bid to shove vouchers down the throat of Texas legislators.14

This is what I know. I know that Greg Abbott is sold out to ogliarchs.

I know that Abbott is hell-bent on destroying public education.

I know that the people behind the sock puppet network that stole my intellectual property and have been hacking and harassing me also use that sock puppet network to promote accounts affiliated with the State of Texas.

I know that the people behind the network use AI to develop personas and generate the comments used by the mass of sock puppet accounts.

I know that they use AI models built by stolen intellectual property for ghostwriting and their own publications, written, audio and video.

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I also know that the majority of the people that I know that are involved in the content and fake engagement ring are homeschoolers … and no, I don’t think they care about public school children in Texas. They literally think that teaching or attending a public school is a fate worse than death.

Based on all of this, I think those funds are going to build an AI model that will replace public education in Texas, except for the worthy few that will get vouchers to subsidize their private, real education.

That is my guess.

Of course, it could be that Glenn Hagar and the entire comptroller department are just completely and utterly incompetent and there are no checks in place at all.

We’ll see. You can’t hide the movement of $67 billion.

What AI Can’t Do

After the events of the past year, I feel very strongly that AI, and specifically ChatGPT, are nothing more than systematized intellectual property theft.

AI does not “generate” it’s own thoughts and words. It is an algorithm. No matter what kind of name and face you put to it, it is still just an algorithm.

AI quantifies. It cannot qualify.

AI cannot assess value. It cannot tell whether something is “good” or not. All it can do is count the number of times a particular position or statement has been made, and that a particular statement has been repeated most does not make it true. The mass can be wrong.

AI assembles words and thoughts from multiple people that have written on a topic and assembles them. The problem is that those pieces can be taken from arguments that are building to very different conclusions.

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This is especially evident in AI generated answers (which search engines are using to steal traffic from the authors and web publishers providing those answers) on anything related to theology or the Bible. They are absolutely horrendous. If you don’t know, you might buy the answer, but that is the point. You are only search if you don’t know, and so AI is feeding ignorance.

AI is designed to be self-referential. It “learns” from positive reinforcement. What the learner/reader/searcher responds positively to is what they will receive more of.

This is antithetical to true education.

Education, true learning, is not there to serve you. Truth is truth. In order to learn, to enlighten our ignorance, we have to be willing to recognize where we are in error. Often, we cannot see that error unless it is pointed out by someone who has mastery in the area we wish to learn.15

Trying to supplant human beings with an AI model is taking constructivism to the extreme. As I wrote six years ago for An Unexpected Journal on constructivism in education,

It is not only “individualized learning,” but “individualized truth.”  A student conditioned in constructivism can easily believe that their position is the correct one regardless of all evidence to the contrary because in the constructivist approach, all information is interpreted through their own perceptions and existing knowledge.  If one of the common goals of an educational system is to create “global citizens”^[13] and “good communicators,” a constructivist mindset undermines that goal.  A community is that in which individuals come together for a common goal and purpose.  Communication is achieved through the transmission of ideas and concepts through agreed upon language.  If we cannot begin on common ground and discuss differences of opinion with an assumption that there actually is a point of agreement that can be reached, we condemn ourselves to living on isolated islands either in contention or domination of another.   As Lewis notes, “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”^[14]   Citizenship is about community.   When we talk about citizenship, it should mean there is a coming together in agreement on certain truths.

WorkQuest Performance Reports as of September 27th

Po 0000350223 Workquest Pens 35 Billion

392KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Po 0000329808 Workquest Printer Supplies 2023 32 Billion

407KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Further Reading

If you are hacked, the instructions you will find on all relevant government sites is that you are to report it to the FBI. From my personal experience, it is worthless to report it. The only thing that happened after I have contacted the FBI multiple times is that the perpetrators were emboldened to go to greater extremes.

Reporting Computer, Internet-related, Or Intellectual Property Crime
https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ccips/reporting-computer-internet-related-or-intellectual-property-crime

Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
https://www.ic3.gov/

What We Investigate:
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber

The Cyber Threat
Malicious cyber activity threatens the public’s safety and our national and economic security. The FBI’s cyber strategy is to impose risk and consequences on cyber adversaries. Our goal is to change the behavior of criminals and nation-states who believe they can compromise U.S. networks, steal financial and intellectual property, and put critical infrastructure at risk without facing risk themselves. To do this, we use our unique mix of authorities, capabilities, and partnerships to impose consequences against our cyber adversaries.

The FBI is the lead federal agency for investigating cyber attacks and intrusions. We collect and share intelligence and engage with victims while working to unmask those committing malicious cyber activities, wherever they are.

Learn more about what you can do to protect yourself from cyber criminals, how you can report cyber crime, and the Bureau’s efforts in combating the evolving cyber threat.

If you’ve been hacked, don’t count on the police for help
Even the FBI and your local police can’t agree on who you should contact first.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/when-you-get-hacked-figuring-out-who-to-call-for-help-can-be-a-puzzle/

An email pops up in your inbox and your eyes widen. A stranger claims to have video footage of you watching porn and asks for $1,000.

There’s outrage and embarrassment. You reach for your phone. But then you wonder, “Who do I even call?”

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is complicated.

As it turns out, even law enforcement officials can’t agree. The FBI and your local police both suggest that you should call them. But experts warn that in many cases, neither agency will be able to help, especially if the criminal is asking for so little money.

This dynamic underscores why these kinds of hacks — and yes, the porn scam really happened — are starting to proliferate. There’s no clear answer on who to call. And from law enforcement’s perspective, many of these crimes are too small to be worth prosecuting. It’s no surprise that cyberattacks have run rampant across the web, as thieves online find ways to steal credit card information from millions of people without leaving their homes.

“If the people doing it keep the dollar amounts small enough that no individual police department is going to be motivated enough to prosecute, you can collect a lot of money from a lot of people all around the world,” said Adam Bookbinder, the former chief of the US Attorney’s cybercrime unit in the district of Massachusetts.

When You Get Hacked, Figuring Out Who to Call for Help Can Be a Puzzle https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/when-you-get-hacked-figuring-out-who-to-call-for-help-can-be-a-puzzle/

August 1, 2007: NASA Spent Millions on a Pen Able to Write in Space
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-spent-millions-on-a-pen-able-t/

https://x.com/RaisedtoWalk/status/1788901523118006324

As the people in the group didn’t want their words shared publicly, and since I am not a plagiarist, I’m just going to give a summary of the discussion that was taking place to give context to my comments.

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As I mentioned in the first post, “Stolen Words,” the class this thread was discussing was “Modern and Post-Modernism and Apologetics” which was designed and taught by Dr. Holly Ordway, who is a Catholic. There was a little bit of discussion in the thread on whether or not one would be penalized for disagreeing with her Catholic position. I don’t think that was the case at all. In my experience, Dr. Ordway was fine if you held a different opinion … you just had to be able to properly defend it. If your arguments were weak, yes, I think you could expect pushback.

Catholics versus Protestants on Contraception

This particular leg of the megathread started off with a discussion on tolerance of differences in denominational positions. I will include this quote,

“There is an unspoken ‘tolerance’ for the protestant, but an underlying ‘but we really know that the (Roman) Catholics are right’”

Personally, I don’t think this was the case. Through the program, I did gain more of an appreciation for Catholicism as I gained a better understanding of what Catholics actually believe, but as you will see in my comments below, that didn’t convert me to Catholicism. There are many areas where I agree with Catholics, but where I don’t agree, it is because I think those particular doctrines are based on traditions of men that have misinterpreted or misapplied particular passages of Scripture.

When I was in the program, that is how I argued my position. I began from Scripture, looking at the relevant passages in the historical context, and explained why I thought the Catholic view was flawed in those areas. I never felt as if my views were dismissed, but I can see where someone might feel that way if they were arguing a point based on “well this is just what I believe.” That may fly in other programs, not in the one that I graduated from under Dr. Ordway.

Having said that, I did not take this class or do the reading for it. This is one I exempted for other classes. It is entirely possible that Catholic doctrine was pushed more heavily in this class than in others.

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The discussion then turned to the Catholic promotion of Natural Family Planning. The definition of natural family planning is:

God designed marriage as an "intimate partnership of life and love" (see Gaudium et spes, no. 48). In God's design, marriage is a unique union of one man with one woman "for the whole of life" (see Canon 1055, The Code of Canon Law). Marriage is oriented to the good of the spouses and to the creation and nurture of new human life (see Gaudium et spes, no. 48). Making decisions therefore, about when and how many children to have in marriage is a sacred responsibility that God has entrusted to husband and wife. This is the foundation of what the Church calls, "Responsible Parenthood," the call to discern God's will for your marriage while respecting His design for life and love.

The Catholic Church supports the methods of Natural Family Planning (NFP) because they respect God's design for married love. In fact, NFP represents the only authentic approach to family planning available to husbands and wives because these methods can be used to both attempt or avoid pregnancy. When learning about NFP, it is important to know that:

Natural Family Planning is an umbrella term for certain methods used to achieve and avoid conception. These methods are based on the observation of the naturally occurring signs and symptoms of the fertile and infertile phases of a woman's menstrual cycle. Some natural methods include use of fertility monitors to better understand the time of the wife's fertility. Married couples using NFP to postpone conception abstain from intercourse and genital contact during the fertile phase of the wife's cycle. No drugs, devices, or surgical procedures are used to avoid pregnancy. Married couples who use NFP to attempt a pregnancy, make use of the fertile window--the optimum time when conception is likely.

NFP reflects the dignity of the human person within the context of marriage and family life, promotes openness to life, and recognizes the value of the child. By respecting the love-giving and life-giving natures of marriage, NFP can enrich the bond between husband and wife. (Standards for Diocesan Natural Family Planning Ministry, p. 23)

- United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

I think it is interesting to compare the Catholic position on family planning versus segments of the evangelical church that are anti-contraception such as the Quiverfull movement which do not believe in putting any brakes on conception at all.

The Catholic position recognizes that there are many reasons where a couple may not want to have one pregnancy after another, whether that be for financial reasons or because of health concerns. Evangelicals seem to completely dismiss that and, in my mind, is a much more misogynistic attitude, because the woman is usually not taken into any consideration at all.

From the there, the discussion touched a little bit on the science of conception and then turned to one of the main questions of the thread, “What is the purpose of sex?” Is it for recreation, pleasure, union, or procreation?

My first response

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The primary purpose [of sex] is communion/union of two people. God does tell Adam and Eve to procreate and subdue the earth, but what is the standout verse regarding their union? [Genesis] 2:24. "This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one."

Jesus quotes the same verse in Matthew 19:5 and Paul calls it is a "great mystery" in Ephesians 5:32. Paul also speaks about this in 1 Corinthians 6:16-17 and verse 17 makes clear the correlation between being united with the Lord in spirit.

Yes, there are a lot of Catholic interpretations in this program. I saw that in the Medieval class. I don't think I got marked down for disagreeing very strongly and at length about purgatory.

I'm glad this is a class I'm exempting

And he said, “‘This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.’ - Matthew 19:5 NLT

16 And don’t you realize that if a man joins himself to a prostitute, he becomes one body with her? For the Scriptures say, “The two are united into one.” 17 But the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him. - 1 Corinthians 6:16-17

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The Male View on Sex

There was quite a bit of pushback in the thread as a whole from one person as seeing the primary purpose of sex as a union between a man and a woman. I’m not sure why that is such a radical concept unless seeing a wife as an equal partner that is capable of a true union was hard for this person to wrap their head around.

Obviously, I’m giving an explanation of what I think they mean from based on their response. If they had been willing for the conversation to be published, their words could have stood for themselves.

But the general gist of the responses from this person was that seeing sex as anything other than for procreation was a sin, which to me, is seeing a woman as an object, an organic incubator, and marriage not as a true partnership, but an arrangement where it’s all about the man and the woman is just there for what she can provide.

My Response to the Primary Purpose of Sex as Procreation

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I don't see it as a directive as the Catholics do. Without looking up the passage, the one where the man was struck dead, the issue was not preventing conception just to prevent conception, but because it was out of rebellion. The Jewish law instructed that a brother was responsible for ensuring that the one who had passed had an heir.

That is the only place I can think of where it is addressed, and I don't think the context warrants an extreme doctrine.

I think that contraceptives -could- be rebellion if a couple is seeking their own will and they believe that God is leading them otherwise, but that is true of anything.

No I don't think the procreative purpose is the main definition of the act. Not at all. It is the spiritual union. It is a real thing, not just an idea or a concept. That is what I see repeated in Scripture.

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Having said that, I do think children are a blessing and most contraceptives can have adverse medical effects, but I don't think that my friend with four kids and who almost died after the birth of her twins was sinning by having her tubes tied.

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I just went and looked at a Catholic answers site. Literally, the only Scripture they use is that one I mentioned about Onan. That is completely taking it out of context. There are some church writers that talk about it two centuries in, but 1) they were either making an entire doctrine out of that one passage, or 2) it was in some relation talking about adultery on the part of women. And like in the Talmud, there was a lot of misogyny in the writings of that time period.

It's like purgatory, an entire doctrine created out of one thing, which in the case of purgatory wasn't even Scripture but because of one reference to something the Maccabees did.

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The Faulty Basis of the Catholic Doctrine on Contraception

More of an explanation on Onan’s sin. This is an explanation from Catholic.com which claims that this passage in Genesis 38 is a condemnation of contraception.

The Bible mentions at least one form of contraception specifically and condemns it. Coitus interruptus was used by Onan to avoid fulfilling his duty according to the ancient Jewish law of fathering children for one’s dead brother. “Judah said to Onan, ‘Go in to your brother’s wife, and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.’ But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife he spilled the semen on the ground, lest he should give offspring to his brother. And what he did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord, and he slew him also” (Gen. 38:8–10).

The biblical penalty for not giving your brother’s widow children was public humiliation, not death (Deut. 25:7–10). But Onan received death as punishment for his crime. This means his crime was more than simply not fulfilling the duty of a brother-in-law. He lost his life because he violated natural law, as Jewish and Christian commentators have always understood. For this reason, certain forms of contraception have historically been known as “Onanism,” after the man who practiced it, just as homosexuality has historically been known as “Sodomy,” after the men of Sodom, who practiced that vice (see Gen. 19). - “Birth Control” Catholic.com

This is a gross misunderstanding of what was going on in Genesis 38. During that time, a woman’s only security was in having sons that would receive an inheritance and take care of her in her old age. That is the reason for the instruction in the Torah that a brother was to give a widow children. So the widow’s children would receive the inheritance her husband was supposed to have which would, in turn, provide for her in her old age.

Onan was going in and having sex with Tamar repeatedly but ensuring she would not get pregnant … thus prolonging his use of her. Onan’s sin was exploitation, not pulling out. It was essentially rape … and the penalty for rape was death.

This Catholic argument completely dismisses the value and worth of the woman by not recognizing the point. Tamar was being used! The Lord ended her exploitation and judged Onan when no one else would.

That is the point of Genesis 38.

No, it is NOT a valid argument against contraception.

My final comments in this leg of the discussion thread.

Catholics are Not Always Against Birth Control

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So XXX: if you want to stir things up, here's this . . .

Catholic church's total ban on contraception challenged by scholars

https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/grace-margins/catholic-churchs-total-ban-contraception-challenged-scholars

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And did you know that Pope Francis allowed birth control for women that were at risk for contracting Zika? How is that coherent and consistent?

Pope Francis, answering on Zika risk, says use of contraception could be possibly permitted

https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/pope-francis-zika-and-contraception

More on Catholic doctrine on contraception:

August 23, 2022: "The Vatican’s Contraception Confusion:

It's like the heady days of Humanae Vitae all over again. Will Pope Francis reverse the Church's teaching on contraception? Can he?"

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-vaticans-contraception-confusion

"What does the Catholic Church teach about contraception?", Institute of Clinical Bioethics, Saint Joseph's University,

https://www.sju.edu/centers/icb/blog/what-does-the-catholic-church-teach-about-contraception

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