The dispute was not whether there might be self-identified Christians who moonlight as serial killers. That there are is beyond dispute. Consider Dennis Rader. Dubbed “BTK” for “Bind, Torture, Kill” by the media (it was a calling card he chose for himself as a distressingly accurate summary of the fate of his victims) he was at large for three decades. During those years he found the time to be a member at Christ Lutheran Church and to get elected president of the congregational council.

You only need one Dennis Rader to force the question: is it possible that a Christian could be a serial killer? As I said, by Christian I don’t merely mean a person who self-identifies as a Christian (a Self-Identifying Christian). Rather, I mean a person who self-identifies as a Christian and is in a saving relationship with God through Jesus Christ (a God-identified Christian). Is it possible to torture and murder people on a periodic basis while being a God-identified Christian?

There are many passages that would seem to preclude this possibility. Consider 1 John 3:9:

“No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.”

Compare:

“No one who is born of God will continue to bind, torture and kill hapless victims, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on binding, torturing and killing, because they have been born of God.”

But there is a problem with this line of reasoning. The problem is that 1 John 3:9 doesn’t flag serial killers per se; rather, it flags sinners.

The problem this presents is set up very well in the following passages from Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines. The excerpts are long but well worth the read. (And anyway Williard is a much better writer than me so if you’ll read my stuff you should definitely be willing to read his):

It was a Bible study at a large Midwestern university in the early sixties. We were mainly graduate students of evangelical background, who met weekly to discuss selected New Testament passages. On this particular occasion we were struggling with I John 3:9-10: “No one born of God commits sin; for God’s nature abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God…. Whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother” (RSV).

“A straightforward reading of the passage seemed to leave this choice: either one is free from sin or one is not a child of God. A very difficult option! But a well-known “saving interpretation” was offered by one of the more sophisticated members of the group. According to it, the form of the Greek verb (poiei) translated as “commits” indicates a continuous action. Hence, the real meaning had to be that the one who is born of God does not sin all the time or continuously. A short moment of triumph ensued.

“But these were bright people, or they would not have been where they were. It was quickly pointed out that even the very ungodly do not sin all the time. They have their good moments. How could merely not sinning continuously suffice to distinguish the child of God from them? Will the one born of God not sin on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday but sin on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? Couldn’t you kill someone every ten years and still meet the condition of not sinning continuously? Maybe even every five years—for every five weeks? Further, would it not introduce chaos into the New Testament teachings if we were to add “continuously” in the translation of every present indicative verb? Experimenting with a few test passages showed that it would. But if it is not to be added in every case, why should it be added just in this case—except to relieve the tension between this text and our lives?

“Things were beginning to heat up. People began to take sides. Those who thought there must be some important sense in which the child of God might be free and should be free from sin were accused of “perfectionism.” Someone finally exploded: “Well are you perfect?” But no one assented.”

“As a result we find ourselves caught on the horns of a dilemma. If one day I assure my Christian friends that I intend to “quit sinning” and arrive at a stage where I can perfectly follow Jesus Christ, they will most likely be scandalized and threatened—or at least very puzzled. “Who do you think you are?” they would probably say. Or they might think, “What is he really up to?”

But if, on the other hand, I state that I do not intend to stop sinning or that I do not plan ever to follow my Lord in actuality, they will be equally upset. And for good reason. How can Jesus be my Lord if I don’t even plan to obey him?” (Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (HarperSanFrancisco, 1988), 11-12, 12-13.)

The dilemma can be stated like this:

(1) God-identified Christians do not sin.

(2) Every Self-identified Christian sins.

(3) Therefore, no Self-identified Christians are God-identified Christians.

As Willard notes, attempts to avoid the problem by revising the first premise to something like “God-identified Christians do not sin continually” is not satisfactory. So what do we say?

Here’s another attempt: “God-identified Christians do not sin without repenting for their sin and seeking restoration.” This definition fits well with 1 John 2:1 which recognizes the practical reality that Christians will continue to sin and when they do they can seek restoration with God through Jesus. As the bumpersticker goes, “I’m not perfect, just forgiven.”

Thus, you can say simply that any self-identified Christian who continues to sin habitually and without repentance and restoration is not a God-identified Christian. Thus any serial killer who doesn’t repent and continues to engage in his wicked deeds is not a real Christian.

There is a problem with this revision of the first premise however. Did you ever know a self-identified Christian who was prone to gossiping? There must be a lot of them out there because The Simpsons even included a Christian gossip in Springfield (Rev. Lovejoy’s wife). The fact about gossips like Rev. Lovejoy’s wife is that they are at some profound level self-deceived about their own righteousness. They justify their actions as they go about assassinating the characters of others. Yet few Christians would want to say that all Christians who have a penchant for gossip safely compartamentalized and unrepented for are going to hell.

Then there’s the youth leader at church who occasionally looks at pornography and the deacon who regularly neglects to declare all his purchases when he crosses the border and the Sunday school teacher who downloads pirated films on Pirate Bay and the lonely old man who sits in the backrow every Sunday smelling like the bottle of rum he drank the night before.

The fact is that the church is full of people who have compartamentalized their lives in such a way that they have habitual ongoing sins for which they have not repented. Are we willing to say that all these people are going to hell?

Let’s say that we’re unwilling to make that final judgement about people who gossip, view pornography, do not pay duties, illegally download films and get drunk. If these people can still be God-identified Christians then what about Dennis Rader? Can’t the serial killer likewise be a God-identified Christian?

To deny that the serial killer can be a God-identified Christian is to open one up to the charge of arbitrariness. But to affirm it is, it would seem, to court a moral absurdity.

But is this a viable assumption or is it a dubious extrapolation from assumptions about the uniqueness of human nature that are themselves no longer defensible? The more we learn about the natural world the more it appears that the latter is the case. Not all animals can sin, but the circumstantial evidence is growing that at least some can. And if this is the case then we’d better get to work thinking through the theological and philosophical implications of it.

Let’s be clear on one thing: if animals can sin it is unlikely that they do so with the same degree of culpability as many humans. A three year old greedily grabs a toy from another toddler at the day care and snaps “Mine!” That’s arguably a sinful act. But it is nowhere near as sinful as his greedy thirty-three year old father selling off toxic debt to unsuspecting traders on Wall Street. It may be that the sin of the animal, where such exists, is closer to the toddler than it is to the stock trader. But sin is sin.

Consider this example from the book When Elephants Weep:

One has to sympathize with Jane Goodall’s reaction to some chimpanzees’ treatment of one old animal, his legs wholly paralyzed by polio, who was lonely, shunned, and sometimes attacked by those still healthy. In the hope of inducing companions who were grooming each other to groom him as well, he dragged himself up into a tree:

“With a loud grunt of pleasure he reached a hand towards them in greeting–but even before he made contact they both swung quickly away and, without a backward glance, started grooming on the far side of the tree. For a full two minutes, old Gregor sat motionless, staring after them. And then he laboriously lowered himself to the ground. As I watched him sitting there alone, my vision blurred, and when I looked up at the groomers in the tree I came nearer to hating a chimpanzee than I had ever done before or since.” (When Elephants Weep (Delta, 1995), 43.)

I don’t think that the chimpanzees sinned with the culpability of a stock trader on Wall Street deceiving other traders. But did they sin with a degree of awareness and culpability approximating the child in the day care? To say the least, the categorical denial that sin is ever present in any of the actions of a chimpanzee is no longer the starting point of discussion. Now it is a bold thesis in want of a bold defense.

Uh huh.

I offered an initial rebuttal here. The gist of my argument was that even granting John’s claim that the Christian church would die out under these circumstances, it wouldn’t follow that Christianity is false. To see why, consider this simple illustration.

Fred claims to have use of a beautiful cabin on the lake. Al retorts that if Fred were to trash the cabin then local law enforcement would remove him from it. “Therefore,” Al concludes, “you don’t have use of it now.”

Needless to say, this argument would not be establishing what Al was claiming. Fred’s eviction by local law enforcement would underdetermine whether he had ever had legal rights to the cabin because that eviction is consistent with both (a) Fred’s having been a squatter in the cabin and (b) Fred’s having been granted the right to use the cabin, a right which was then revoked because of his abuse of the cabin.

John’s argument has the same problem. Even if the Christian church died out following this mass refusal to fulfill the Great Commission (i.e. trashing the cabin) it wouldn’t follow that Christianity was false, since this outcome would be consistent with God taking punitive measures by allowing the church to disappear (i.e. retracting the right to use the cabin).

If John’s argument was a coho salmon, it would now be a fillet cleaned on the beach and ready to be roasted over the fire. But he’s still pretending it is swimming in the lake. How does he do this? By pointing to another salmon spashing in the water and claiming that that is his salmon.

Yes folks, in his most recent post on the topic he simply drops his old, now defunct argument and presents a new one here. He states this new argument like this:

“In order to suppose that his faith would not die out he needs to provide some objective evidence that his God is doing something now that would help convert people if Christians stopped sharing the gospel.”

 Since John is loathe to present his arguments in clearly stated and logically connected propositions (much like the Hunchback is loathe to emerge from the shadows of Notre Dame), I’ll again fulfill this task.

(1) For a Christian to believe rationally that the Christian faith is true, the Christian must be able to present evidence that could persuade a non-Christian that God is working in history to propagate the Christian faith.

You can guess the rest: Christians cannot present this evidence and therefore, Christians cannot rationally believe that Christianity is true.

However, for all intents and purposes (1) basically collapses into:

(1′) For a Christian to believe rationally that the Christian faith is true, the Christian must be able to present evidence that could persuade a non-Christian that Christianity is true.

But why would John think this? And why would he think anybody else should?

I am going to assume with charity that John is being consistent in his argument in which case (1′) depends on a general principle like this:

In order to believe rationally that p you must be able to persuade a skeptic of p that p is true. 

Needless to say, very few people believe such a thing and so if John believes it he ought not believe it which blows up his whole tortured argument.

Now let’s wait to see whether John comes up with an even worse argument on the third go around.

The Problem

The line between atheist and agnostic used to be clear. Atheists believed that no God or gods existed. Agnostics didn’t have any belief as to whether God or gods existed. But today people have taken to calling themselves atheists simply because, as it is commonly said, they “lack belief in gods”. In other words, agnostics now call themselves atheists.

I offer three reasons why they should refrain from this confusing practice.

Reason 1: By this logic my Maltese/Shih Tzu (AKA Maltzu) is now an atheist

Maggie, our puppy, lacks belief in God. (So does our 6 year old Lhasa apso Sonny, but that’s another illustration for another day.) If lack of belief in gods is sufficient to be an atheist then Maggie is an atheist. Some “atheists” may think it is a bonus to get the animal kingdom on their side. But this strikes me as just plain silly.

Reason 2: By this logic anarchism is the default governance affiliation

Anarchy has traditionally been defined as the theory that governance ought to proceed without the authority of the state, directly by the people. Most of us are not anarchists in that traditional sense. Instead, we prefer constitutional monarchies, or constitutional republics, or perhaps one or another form of democracy.

But what if we currently lack any clear convictions about which of these is the preferred mode of governance? Then, by parity of reasoning we should follow the new atheist’s redefinition. By lacking any convictions we are “anarchists” in this broadened sense.

But this too is silly.

Reason 3: By this logic agnostics are also theists

Finally, the reasoning goes that lack of belief in God is sufficient to make one an atheist. Again by parity of reasoning it would follow that lack of belief in the non-existence of God would be sufficient to make one a theist. So if we accept this redefinition then it follows that agnostics are simultaneously atheists and theists.

Will this foolishness never end?

“I don’t think it’s wrong to cause someone extreme pain to get them to confess specific information (the whereabouts of a bomb they placed) to save the lives of other innocent people. Even though it’s called torture I don’t think it is the same as causing someone pain for your own fun or revenge, or causing someone pain to possibly extract useful information they may have. That’s why I don’t think it’s helpful to discuss torture as wrong in and of itself.”

El Bryan then asked “So why do you see all forms as torture being wrong?”

There is something in El Bryan’s comments that remind me of Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous 2002 interrogation memo in which he suggested that 4 hours of forced standing was insufficient because “I stand for 8-10 hours a day.” Rumsfeld’s glib comment clearly suggested that he didn’t really grasp the full implications of the torture techniques he was affirming. And I can’t help but suspect that El Bryan doesn’t either.

Human beings have a long history of torturing one another in incredibly creative ways. A visit to the medieval torture chamber at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum will provide a memorable experience. When one walks through the gory displays one is led not to think “What wonderfully creative ways human beings have devised to extract information from one another!” Rather, one is led to think “What beasts we can be to one another.”

These days most of the techniques immortalized in wax at the London landmark have fallen into disuse. But dozens of other techniques have replaced them. The website of the International Society for Human Rights provides a list of current techniques being used in China.

To begin with, there is the lifting of arms twisted behind the back. Here is a description from the ISHR:

The arms of the victim are twisted behind the back and bound with a thin rope. The arms of the victim are then pulled upwards, thus becoming overstretched and often dislocated. The rope cuts into the victim’s flesh. The pain is so severe that the victim sometimes loses control over their bladder.

And then there is the application of electric shocks. The ISHR describes:

The victims receive electric shocks all over the face, including in the eyes, as well as in the genitals, nipples and other sensitive body parts. Electric shocks are also applied in the mouth and vagina.

The electric shocks leave behind burn marks. These wounds often become inflamed and make further electric shocks even more painful.

Wandering through the macabre list provided by the ISHR (available here) one has a sense for how far we haven’t come since the Middle Ages.

The practical problems with torture are well known: it rarely if ever yields useable information. And people under extreme torture will do anything to escape the agony.

But we must not lose sight of the even more important reasons, namely that the act of torturing others constitutes a fundamental assault on our own humanity.

This is a picture of Dillawar, the innocent cab driver in Afghanistan who was tortured to death by American troops, a harrowing tale narrated in the Academy Award winning documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side”. This is what he looked like before he was beaten to death in a vain attempt to extract intelligence. This is what he looked like before his face was turned into a modern day Emmett Till and his legs were, as the coroner put it, “pulpified”.  

The lesson has been illustrated countless times in history that whenever human beings resort to torture it always comes back to haunt them. With that in mind I offer the Parable of the Mustard Gas:

The troops were locked in battle against the other side. Day after day the weary soldiers shot their guns and cowered in their ditches. Finally, the captain said “Enough of this. Release the mustard gas!” With a great blast the mustard gas was released and in a massive noxious cloud it drifted over the field, hitting the other troops and leaving them writhing in agony as their life ebbed away. The captain smiled. They had won.

But before he knew what happened the wind shifted and the cloud blew back over the captain’s troops. Within minutes they too were writing in agony as their life also ebbed away.

That’s why it is wrong to torture. It doesn’t just destroy the humanity of the one being tortured. It destroys the humanity of those who torture, and those who devise new ways to torture.

And that’s why nobody leaves Madame Tussaud’s saying “I sure am glad to be human!”

1) If Christianity is true then the Christian faith will probably not die out if Christians stop proselytizing.

(2) The Christian faith will probably die out if Christians stop proselytizing.

(3) Therefore Christianity is false.

 It is, if nothing else, a novel argument.

When he offered this argument yesterday I countered with some initial criticisms. I’ll unpack those criticisms a bit more here.

The first point, as I noted, is that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. What does follow is:

(3′) Therefore, Christianity is probably false.

That correction is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively minor course correction.

More serious are the problems with the two premises.

To begin with the phrase “if Christians stop proselytizing” is ambiguous. Here are a couple possible meanings:

(Scenario 1): Christians refrain from all active evangelism and mission. In that case a person could still share their faith if asked about it.

(Scenario 2): Christians refrain from ever referring to their faith to outsiders, even if asked. That would include shutting down all Christian publishing and broadcasting, shuttering the doors of all churches, and practicing the faith secretly underground.

Needless to say there is a huge difference between these two scenarios (and the many other possible meanings). And John is obliged to explain which one he means since the continued growth of Christianity would be more miraculous under some of these conditions than others.

Now here’s the way that John seems to be thinking about these matters. The idea is something like a corporate bonding event where office workers are asked to team up as buddies and take turns falling backward into the arms of the other person. Trusting the person by falling back into their arms is a way of forcing them to act to save you.

And so by the same token the church that refuses to proselytize (on either of these scenarios) would be forcing God’s hand. This would have the following result: if God exists then he will act supernaturally to save the church. If God does not exist then there is no God to save the church and it will die out, thereby establishing that God (probably) doesn’t exist.

The problem is that we have no reason to accept that probabilistic claim. In fact, we have an excellent reason to believe it is false and that God would, in fact, allow the church to go extinct.

In order to see why this is the case we need to keep in mind first that an essential hallmark of the church is that it is missional. Jesus commanded his disciples to go into all the world and preach the gospel. Thus, the church that refused to do that would be the church that was abdicating its right to be called the church.

Think about it like this. If Tony is paying the Mafia protection money to keep his pizza place running smoothly, then one can expect that if Tony fails to pay the protection money it will have negative repercussions for the pizzeria.

Okay, don’t get sidetracked by the fact that I compared God to a mafioso. I wasn’t comparing the problematic dimensions of the illustration (e.g. extortion). I was simply observing that people who fail to recognize their end of a contract/coevnant relationship face repercussions for doing so.

So if the visible church committed mass disobedience by refusing to fulfill the missio dei then you can expect the visible church would suffer. Perhaps it would disappear altogether.

Now you might be thinking: but how could God allow the church to disappear?

That’s a fair question and it brings us to the final problem with Loftus’s argument: he fails to distinguish the invisible and visible churches. Augustine was the first theologian to develop this important distinction at some length in response to the collapse of the Roman Empire. How could God’s empire — Rome — be falling to the barbarians? In response to this dilemma, Augustine distinguished between the temporal, shifting power institutions in history and the one Kingdom of God — that eternal city — which is unaffected by the shifting fortunes of history. Thus, even if visible kingdoms and institutions fade away, God’s kingdom remains eternal.

For these reasons Loftus’s argument is utterly without force. Even if he could establish that Christianity as we have known it would probably disappear if Christians stopped evangelizing (and he certainly hasn’t shown that), he would still have provided no reason to think that the disappearance was owing to the non-existence of God rather than the judgment of God on an unfaithful people.

Imagine that we are talking about a bicycle. You say you are going to paint the bicycle blue. Is it morally justifiable for you to do that?

The question invites another question: is it your bike to paint? If it is your bike then it likely is justifiable for you to paint it. But if you merely have it on loan from somebody else and that person has not given you permission to paint it, then it would seem you shouldn’t paint it. The principle is straightforward: if you don’t have ownership of something you don’t have the same rights over it that the person who owns it does.

The same principle applies to the body. If a person believes they own their body in a way analogous to ownership of the bicycle then they will view as morally permissible an entire range of actions which we would not consider moral if we believed that people did not have primary ownership of their bodies. In that case trashing our bodies or using them improperly without permission or contrary to the explicit will of the owner would be open to moral censure just like trashing a bicycle that is merely on loan.

Christians believe that human life is a gift from God. Our lives are not ours to live as we please. The perspective is captured eloquently in this poem by Elizabethan poet Ben Jonson on the death of his first son:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy;

Seven yeeres tho’ wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I loose all father, now. For why

Will man lament the state he should envie?

To have so soon scap’d worlds and fleshes rage,

And, if no other miserie, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lye

Ben Johnson his best piece of poetrie.

For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

The key line is found when Jonson reflects that his child was lent to him. His child was never really his. Imagine that your neighbor loans you a lawnmower for seven straight years and then one day you come home and discover that he took it back again. Have you any ground for complaint? Of course not. Your only place is to thank the owner for the seven years of use.

That is Jonson’s attitude about the seven years he enjoyed with his beloved son. And it is the same attitude a person should have for every day they are able to enjoy life in this material body.

Life is an extraordinary gift, but it is a gift on loan. Like the bicycle, so with the life, we do not retain absolute ownership of our bodies and our moral judgments must be qualified accordingly.

What if the daughter was terminally ill and had made an appeal to the Make a Wish foundation? Would we then agree that she should get John the Baptist’s head?

Clearly not. There are limits to what can be morally given, even when the one making the request is a terminally ill child.

Let’s keep that in mind as we consider Jag Levak’s “argument” for the appropriateness of granting sexual favors to dying children. Here’s what he wrote:

consider a scenario like this: Charlie, we’ll call him, is a 15 year old boy who will not live to see 16. He has an untreatable condition which the doctors have concluded will kill him inside three months, and he knows it. For now, medicine is holding the symptoms at bay, and he doesn’t feel bad most of the time, but that’s only going to last a little while longer. Charlie is good friends with Beverly, the single, attractive, 30 year old woman next door. He has long had a secret crush on Beverly, and with time running out, Charlie lets her know how he feels about her, and how one of the things he most regrets is that he is going to die never having known what it was like to be with a woman. Beverly is torn, but she ultimately decides the greatest good she could do in the situation would be to fulfill a dying wish for Charlie, and over the course of three weeks, they have multiple sexual encounters, which Charlie considers the best experience of his entire life. And then his symptoms worsen rapidly, and in another month he is gone.

Legally, there might be no question that Beverly committed a felony sex offense. But morally? What sort of standard could hold without qualification that what she did was evil? How many people would righteously condemn her for the gift she gave a dying boy?

Jag seems to think that this scenario is meant to present a challenge or a dilemma of some sort. Otherwise, why bother presenting it?

The problem is that this scenario has absolutely zero rational appeal to a person who believes it is wrong to grant sexual favors to children.

Imagine for the moment that the issue was torture. I’ve argued that it is always morally wrong to torture another human being. My interlocutor then replies like this:

“Okay, but imagine that there is a bomb hidden somewhere in a busy downtown and it will go off in an hour. The only way to prevent it going off is to torture the guy who planeted it by giving him electric shocks of increasing intensity until he talks. How many people would righteously condemn the police for torturing him?”

Would this familiar ticking time bomb trope have any probative significance for me to reconsider my position? Of course not. My position is that it is always wrong to torture people and that means that it is never morally permissible to do so. Thus, anybody who were to present a case for torture to me would be somebody who had apparently not yet grasped the position I hold. 

You might as well try to win over a committed vegan by describing a thick, juicy steak.  

So when Jag describes a scenario where a grown woman grants sex favors to a dying child, I’m not moved, I’m sickened.

The funny thing is that he thinks this is a moving scenario. As he commented afterward: “I deliberately chose a scenario which, based on the feelings most people would have, would tend to lead in a direction different from what an absolutist standard might, but that was the point. If our feelings are reliable, then the absolutist standard is not.” Based on what does Jag think that most people would be moved to give a nudge and a wink to Beverly’s actions?

Here’s one of the questions I then asked Jag: “What if Charlie is 14? Should Beverly sleep with him then? What if he is 13? 12? 11? 10?”

Jag replied: “I see someone running away from the scenario that was presented. If you are asking if there can be cases where it *would* be wrong for an adult to have sex with a child, then yes, of course. But that was never at issue. The question was whether it is *always* wrong.”

Notice that it is Jag who is “running away from the scenario that was presented.” He is quite sure that it was a good thing for Beverly to provide sexual favors to a fifteen year old child. But at the same time apparently he agrees that it would be wrong for her to grant the same request to a child of a significantly younger age. However, he refuses to say when.

And this is where Jag’s criticism of what he calls “absolutism” is exposed for the sham it is. You see, he just admitted that it would be wrong to have sex with children of a certain age. Let’s say Jag would draw the line at the age of ten. Sexual favors are okay for 11 year olds and up but not 10 and younger.

In this case he would be saying it is *always* wrong to have sex with a ten year old. And that means that Jag is as much an “absolutist” as anybody else. He just draws the lines differently.

And note that there are many people — members of NAMBLA among them — who would balk at Jag’s “absolutism”.

So Jag and I are both moral absolutists. (Welcome to the club Jag!)

The difference, as I noted, is that I believe sex should be shared between a couple in a married, covenantal union whereas Jag thinks it can be doled out to terminally ill fifteen year olds upon request.

In a follow up post I’ll say a bit more about how worldview assumptions shape our different positions.

Generally speaking it is a handsome cover, I think. But I had one misgiving: does the world need yet another book featuring a detail from Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” on the cover? Perhaps not. But then the world doesn’t need another superhero movie either…

The worst thing about living in a small town is that it is hard not to get to know people really well.

I lived in a small town for ten months. One day I got my car stuck in the snowbank while backing out of my driveway.

Before I could make it to the garage to get a shovel two neighbors had materialized from nowhere with shovels of their own, ready to dig and push.

I greatly appreciated the effort of course, but the speed of the rapid response team prompted the uncomfortable thought that everyone just sits looking out their window watching the neighbors and waiting for some action, any action.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Then ”Ethel get the shovel. The neighbor’s stuck!”

That experience encapsulated my time living in a small town. On the one hand, everyone is always there ready to help out. On the other hand, everyone is always there ready to help out.

Like I said, I lasted ten months.