Christian Wiman On God And Suffering

The brilliant poet keeps surviving cancer to gift us another book.

Christian is a poet and author, and, in my view, one of the most piercing writers on faith in our time. He served as the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, the NYT Book Review and others. He’s the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books, and his new one is called Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. Matt Sitman and I did a pod episode with him 12 years ago; so it was a real delight to reconnect for a second. I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve yet produced. But make up your own mind.

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on finding God through suffering, and getting a glimpse of the divine through psychedelics — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in poverty and trauma in West Texas; his father was a Bible salesman turned doctor but volatile and addiction-prone; murder-suicide in his extended family; Christian’s anger over his upbringing; discovering poetry in college was a life preserver; the silence found in the middle and end of poems; Emily Dickinson’s dashes; Zadie Smith; how pure joy is destabilizing; C.S. Lewis; how the comforts of modern life insulate us from the ultimate questions; Pascal; the voiceless film Into Great Silence; Terrence Malick; me contemplating the Trinity on MDMA; an argument between Jesus and Nietzsche on magic mushrooms; how Nietzsche drove Christian away from God in college but eventually strengthened his faith; eternal return; “Christ is much larger than Christianity”; my friend Patrick who perished from AIDS; Christian facing oblivion with cancer many times; questioning his own faith constantly; Aeschylus; Rumi; Montaigne; Leonard Cohen; eternity as a release from time; Augustine on time; Job and undeserved suffering; theodicy; Anna Kamieńska’s poem “A Prayer That Will Be Answered”; Larkin’s “Church Going” and “This Be The Verse”; Auden; Carlo Rovelli and perception; and the profound feminism of Jesus.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Abigail Shrier on why the cult of therapy harms children, Richard Dawkins on religion, Johann Hari on weight-loss drugs, Adam Moss on the artistic process, and George Will on Trump and conservatism. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

On the episode last week with Rob Henderson, a listener exclaims, “That was a terrific show!” A clip:

“I do not agree with you,” says this listener:

I was a high school counselor for 24 years at a school that sent over 90 percent of our graduates to college. My main job was to help kids get through the college admissions process. Your impression of the SAT is so far off-base that I had to write. The SAT is just one part of the college admissions process, and no one gets admitted or denied solely on their test score. I found it interesting that you promoted your episode with Rob Henderson by writing “his life was saved by a standardized test in the military” — but then, during the episode, Rob pointed out he had an interview with a Yale admissions person who asked him to explain his high school transcript (an impressive interview I’m sure, because Rob is articulate), and he said he completed a couple of night school courses to prove he was ready to be a student. So it wasn’t just the standardized test.

A test score generally reflects what grades tell a college. Grades and scores generally match and affirm each other. If a student like Rob had sent a fantastic test score with a GPA of 2.2 to any college when he was 18, he most likely would have been rejected because he’s a smart but lazy student. Why would a college want someone like that? Why would an employer want a smart but lazy worker? Reverse that, and I had many students in this category — good grades but a mediocre test score — and the college is keen to take that student because those grades reflect hard work in the classroom.

Oh, but what about the notorious grade inflation that’s occurring? Colleges expect a high school profile with every application, and that profile will explain things about the school. In my school’s case, besides demographic info, we liked to emphasize how many AP courses we offered and how over 80 percent of our students had a college-level course while in high school. In general, colleges know about the high school from where the applicants are coming and can spot bullshit.

Finally, I know you are “enraged” that the SAT is being disregarded: “the SATs are a life-line for marginalized teens.” Please let me know where the studies are that show that.

The Dish three years ago covered this subject in depth: “Killing The SAT Means Hurting Minorities,” and here’s the study it’s centered on:

A key moment in this debate came last year after the influential and massive California higher education system commissioned a deep, scholarly report on the SATs, conducted by their own academics over eighteen months. What the exhaustive study found was that the SAT remains the best measurement available to find capable students who are black, poor, or first-generation immigrant.

The good news is that more and more colleges are going back to the SAT — because it’s the best way to add diversity without lowering standards! Here’s Rob talking about the culture shock he experienced at Yale:

Another dissent over the episode:

I appreciate your work and enjoyed your conversation with Rob Henderson, but I found your tone throughout to be a few ticks too supercilious and brittle — not toward Rob, but toward the “elites” of the academic left, especially those who subscribe to versions of critical race and critical gender theories. Most of your listeners will agree that the discourse around identity has become too rigid, but many of us still find the ideas that underpin it interesting and, at times, instructive. In much the same way, I find your barbed hostility to these theories too rigid, and yet I still learn from you each week.

I’m writing to ask that you bring on a few more guests you don’t agree with, perhaps even a few academics who are doing interesting work on race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. Here are some suggestions — academic and otherwise: Eddie Glaude Jr, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Jay Caspian Kang, Jamelle Bouie, and Perry Bacon Jr. Thanks for considering. We’d all learn from it.

I invited Perry Bacon Jr on the pod last year but he declined — a frequent response from the woke corners of the commentariat. Skip Gates would be great but he’s probably way too busy. Previous guests on the Dishcast I’ve debated on race include Briahna Joy Gray and Michael Hirschorn; and on transgender issues, Mara Keisling and Dana Beyer; and on feminism, Jill Filipovic. I also went on Briahna’s own pod to grapple with racism and neoracism in America:

A few more recs:

It’s not surprising to me that Bill Kristol has joined the many Republicans who oppose Trump and consider him a threat to American constitutional norms. It’s a bit more surprising that Kristol has repudiated many of the positions that he’s taken in the past, even though I once regarded him as little more than a partisan hack, dutifully disgorging all major GOP talking points (though it does seem that he’s still in favor of unlimited US intervention worldwide). I think he’d make a great interview, should he be amenable to such.

The same with Victor Davis Hanson. This man is a distinguished classicist, and one of our foremost military historians. When he backed Trump in 2016, I was neither surprised nor offended. I had read some of his posts on National Review, and I was aware that he was a Republican who normally backed the party line. I was perhaps naive enough to believe that after January 6, he might reconsider his support for Trump. Well … I was very wrong on that point! But his book The Western Way of War was, and remains, a classical study of ancient Greek warfare and its legacy. I was sorry to learn that even his later classical scholarship began to show signs of his modern ultra-conservative ideology.

I very much doubt Kristol would be amenable based on everything I’ve written about him — this piece especially. And honestly, I don’t think he adds anything to a debate except his own latest attempt to suck up to whoever is in power. One more guest rec:

I would offer Matt Johnson, author of How Hitchens Can Save the Left. Matt is a highly articulate expat from Kansas, now living with his new bride in Switzerland. He is a moderate, strong on free speech and globalism.

A reader has had enough of Google:

As a result of reading last week’s Dish, I changed the default search engine for my Firefox browser to Bing instead of Google (and I’m liking it). I had already stopped using Chrome for data privacy reasons, but if I hadn’t made the switch earlier, I would do so now. I’m kind of stuck with Gmail, but I’m looking at switching over to Dropbox from Google Drive.

Here’s a dissent over that Gemini piece:

I work in the tech industry. There are tons of anti-woke people in tech, because the industry is mostly men, mostly nerds and mostly wealthy. As a result, my colleagues — like all good libertarians — are mostly coddled in privilege they assume is not only fairly earned but rightfully deserved. But the difference between them and Damore is they don’t rant publicly about their political views. They put their heads down and do their jobs, because earning a paycheck is more important than trying to be socially disruptive. Anyone who has been in white-collar work for more than a decade has seen HR trends come and go. None of it lasts. In the end, the only thing that survives is the pursuit of profit and growth.

And that’s the biggest joke about all your performative outrage equating Google to state media organizations under Stalin, or Mao, or whoever. What you really should be offended by is that a company has managed to grow its level of influence to the point that people think their only hope for understanding the truth of the world is through chatting with a large language model offered by that single company. Except, wait, no, that’s not the case: OpenAI models are much more popular. Meta’s model got “leaked” and now powers every open source effort. Meanwhile, a dozen other global mega-corps are competing to develop the best of the bunch. So you pontificating about how Google is trying to brainwash the world through AI is either catastrophizing, or acknowledging that Google is a monopoly and therefore should be dismantled. You can’t have it both ways.

The truth of it is, tech companies as corporate entities do not give a crap about being beneficial to society, regardless of what is said by woke product managers they hired to spout platitudes on social media. Tech companies and their employees only care about making money and dominating the market. It’s a job. Morals do not come into it. This is perfectly exemplified by what happened with OpenAI — ostensibly a non-profit, but who kicked out the CEO of their for-profit subsidiary and subsequently faced a worker backlash because it turns out most tech workers aren’t motivated by ideology after all; they just want to get rich.

Welcome to Silicon Valley. Please watch the same-titled Mike Judge show if you still don’t understand.

One more reader on the topic:

Your article on Gemini seems to exist in a time-box from five years ago — a time when radical woke ideology was still on the rise, when Google releasing something into the world was uniquely dangerous. But the reality today is that there is very little danger to write about: within days of its release, Google’s CEO was either forced or compelled to say the Gemini launch was bad and entirely unacceptable. And there is very little disagreement from any corner of the tech universe.

Now, I agree with you that Gemini’s value system is driven from the top, and that Sundar Pichai needs to step down as CEO because the culture he created did, in fact, corrupt one of the most important products Google has ever launched. But it’s already widely acknowledged that Gemini is considered a failure — internally at Google and externally in the culture we live in. Radical woke ideology is in retreat. It’s not dead yet, but it lost. (And you were part of the cavalry that helped push it over the cultural cliff.) So Gemini did the liberal cause a favor in this regard: it showed us what this illiberal and religiously-tinged ideology is all about in a concentrated, programmatic way that couldn’t be spun by a charismatic academic or “patron saint of woke.”

There are indeed reasons to be more cheerful now than a few years ago. This next reader is exasperated by an email from last week:

I agree with you on both your recent column on Alexei Navalny (RIP), and on the DEI-fication of artificial intelligence (which would be funny if it wasn’t so sad). Instead, I want to talk about something else: an email you posted last week from a self-identified normie gay man with two Black adopted children who wants to cheer us up about the state of small-town America. His neighbors are all Republicans, and they like and accept him as he is! Racism is no big deal! Everybody’s chill! How heartwarming and inspiring! Yay!

And then we get this absolute banger of a quote from the biological father of the writer’s children: “President Trump would never [ban Menthol cigarettes]. That’s why I’m voting for him.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there it is. Democracy, the Constitution, peaceful transitions of power, and any semblance of decency in the White House can go screw themselves, as long as this voter has his bread and circuses and Menthol cigarettes.

Let’s just say I’m sympathetic to any man refusing to relinquish his daily vice. And I don’t actually think the dude is a one-issue Menthols voter. Another reader wants to know if my views on drug laws have changed:

I was taken aback by one of the “In the Stacks” links — the one to Nancy Rommelmann’s piece denouncing drug decriminalization in Portland, which you called a “disaster”. What?! After decades of denouncing the drug war, you are now opposing efforts to end it? I understand that the extremism of the Defund the Police crowd makes criminal justice reform efforts in general look bad, but c’mon; you’ve gone from (in the original Daily Dish) frequently criticizing the GOP positions on the drug war, capital punishment, etc, to promoting the “tough on crime” position on all criminal justice issues. If you have indeed changed your mind on legalizing drugs, I think you owe your readers an explanation as to why.

You’re right that I need to unpack this some more — and I’m grateful for the prod. I haven’t changed my mind on the craziness of the drug war; nor have I shifted on capital punishment. What I’m reacting to is the failure of some of the most prominent drug legalization experiments, and the lessons we might learn from that. Do we go even bigger? Or have we learned something important?

This next reader has some good news and some bad:

I imagine you receive messages like this all the time and I don’t expect a response, but felt compelled to write to you. I’ve been a Dish subscriber for several years now, after being introduced to you through your conversations with Sam Harris.  I live in DC with my wife and two dogs — both basset-mix rescues. Your piece on Bowie’s passing, including your reader contributions from 2013 on dying pets, actually inspired my wife and I to adopt our second pup over the holidays:

I’d love to write more about my affinity for the Dishcast and your writing, but that’s not why I’m reaching out. Last week, the Ghana parliament passed the euphemistically named “Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Act,” which would criminalize gay relationships as well as anyone publicly supporting gay rights. There’s still hope that the president will refuse to sign it into law, but nothing concrete as yet.

Uganda passed a similar law earlier this year with more draconian sentencing than Ghana’s, including potential life imprisonment and the death penalty. These are both majority Christian countries that have fallen victim to U.S. organizations from the Christian Right pushing hateful messages (alongside more standard prosperity gospel garbage). I was raised Catholic and attended Jesuit schools growing-up. I’m not the most devout these days (I’m a Sam Harris fan, after all) but this sort of thing makes my blood boil.

You were a great champion for gay rights in America. It seems to me that certain Americans — having lost the battle at home — are now targeting vulnerable populations abroad. Would you ever consider lending your voice / platform to addressing this topic? It seems to me they could use a champion.

I’ve always made a point of noting that, in the world at large, gay men and lesbians still face extraordinary levels of actual oppression, even though the West has largely settled on the most liberal regime in human history. That’s where I would be focusing on, for an actual gay rights group these days. The danger is fashioning too crude a Western intervention, which could make matters worse in some places. But yes, I think being thrown off a roof is a different order of magnitude than misgendering a genderqueer brat in queer theory studies.

On the rescue-pup front, Truman got some quality time with Bodenner while I was bedridden with the norovirus this week (super not-fun):

Other pics of rescue dogs always welcome: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

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