Charles Hawkins

On Broadway, brain chemistry, and the communal work of being re-storied At the Booth Theatre this spring, Kara Young describes something that sounds, at first, like a metaphor. Theater, she says, can “change your brain chemistry.” It is a bold claim—one that might be dismissed as actorly enthusiasm—until one listens more closely to what she is actually naming. In the current revival of Proof, the script has not changed. The lines remain the same. But the casting has. Black actors now inhabit roles that, in earlier productions, were not imagined in that way. And suddenly the story is not quite the same story. What once read primarily as a meditation on genius and mental illness becomes, in Young’s telling, a story also about Black genius, about caretaking under pressure, about the social textures of grief, about what is lost when a life is given over to holding another life together. Nothing in the text has altered. And yet everything has. This is precisely the sort of moment narrat...

Noah Hawley’s recent essay in The Atlantic , “What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat,” is not finally about luxury. Private jets, elite guests, curated conversation, and expensive weather are part of the tableau, but they are not the burden of the piece. Hawley is after something deeper and more unsettling: what happens to the human soul when consequence begins to disappear. His most memorable line is also his thesis: for the richest men on earth, “everything is free and nothing matters.” That sentence deserves to be heard not only as cultural criticism but as theological diagnosis. The biblical tradition has older language for the condition Hawley describes. It calls it having “no fear of God.” That phrase is easily misunderstood. In modern ears, “fear of God” can sound like terror, coercion, or religious manipulation. But in Scripture the fear of the Lord is usually something more like reverence, humility, and answerability. It is the knowledge that one ...

On Ezekiel,  Pulp Fiction,  and the temptation to turn holy words into spectacle There is something revealing about the recent controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of “Ezekiel 25:17” language in a Pentagon worship service. The immediate issue is easy enough to name. The words he used were not, in any full sense, the words of Ezekiel. The biblical verse is short and severe: “I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful punishments. Then they shall know that I am the Lord.” In context, it belongs to Ezekiel’s oracle against Philistia, within a larger set of judgments against the nations. It is prophetic speech arising out of the trauma of exile, and its point is not human bravado but divine sovereignty. But biblical language has a way of wandering. In  Pulp Fiction , Ezekiel 25:17 was expanded into one of the most memorable monologues in modern film. The opening lines about “the path of the righteous man,” the “tyranny of evil men,” and being...

A recent Vox interview with psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, timed to the release of her new book Once Upon a Stranger , offers a modest and welcome claim: talking to strangers is usually better for us than we think. We tend to overestimate the awkwardness, underestimate the rewards, and allow a nervous inner monologue to keep us from simple acts of human contact. Sandstrom’s larger argument is that small conversations can widen a life, ease loneliness, and strengthen human flourishing.   That is sensible advice for an anxious age. But the biblical tradition has always pressed the matter further. In Scripture, the stranger is not merely a possible contributor to our well-being. The stranger is a test of public morality. That is a stronger claim than modern therapeutic language usually permits. We prefer to talk about social connection in terms of mood, confidence, resilience, and mental health. Those are not unimportant matters. But the Jewish and Christian traditions have long un...

A recent Vox interview with psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, occasioned by her new book Once Upon a Stranger, makes a simple claim: talking to strangers is usually better for us than we think. We tend to overestimate the awkwardness, underestimate the rewards, and forget how much ordinary human contact can enlarge a day. Sandstrom’s research-based counsel is practical and humane. Most of us, she suggests, are carrying around a nervous inner narrator that warns us not to speak first, not to risk embarrassment, not to cross the little invisible boundaries of modern life. And so we pass one another by.   That is sound psychological advice for an age of loneliness. But the religious tradition goes further. In Scripture, the stranger is not merely a missed opportunity for self-improvement. The stranger is a theological event. That may sound like too much weight to place on a passing encounter in a waiting room, a coffee shop, or a church narthex. But the biblical imagination has always ...

A recent Vox interview with psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, occasioned by her new book Once Upon a Stranger , makes a simple claim: talking to strangers is usually better for us than we think. We tend to overestimate the awkwardness, underestimate the rewards, and forget how much ordinary human contact can enlarge a day. Sandstrom’s research-based counsel is practical and humane. Most of us, she suggests, are carrying around a nervous inner narrator that warns us not to speak first, not to risk embarrassment, not to cross the little invisible boundaries of modern life. And so we pass one another by.   That is sound psychological advice for an age of loneliness. But the religious tradition goes further. In Scripture, the stranger is not merely a missed opportunity for self-improvement. The stranger is a theological event. That may sound like too much weight to place on a passing encounter in a waiting room, a coffee shop, or a church narthex. But the biblical imagination has alway...