The liberal arts seem neverendingly threatened, most recently at small and mid-sized Christian universities in the Midwest that are reviewing their liberal arts programs for discontinuance. Their replacement of venerable programs with what’s “market-aligned” — theology and philosophy exchanged for business and data analytics — seems particularly disrespectful to their religious heritage and more generally, in the words of Jessica Houten Wilson, “soulless.” Nevertheless, given the endangered status, it’s important to ask what the liberal arts are for.

We may be able to distinguish between two answers. One focuses on adaptability and self-invention, with talk of finding complexities and new articulations, counternarratives and new ways of being human. The other is about finding elusive ground for integrity.

One approach to the question is to first ask what a good liberal-arts student looks like. A likely unexpected (and undesirable) answer is Tom Ripley. He’s a conman, first appearing in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), who is sent to Europe to bring Dickie Greenleaf from his carefree life of painting and sailing back to New York and his wealthy and naive father, but ends up taking Dickie’s life, money, and identity. In Netflix’s recent and brilliant Ripley, Steve Zaillian adds scenes in which Ripley looks attentively at writing and especially art. Caravaggio even shows up as a character, as well as a cinematographic influence.

We first see Ripley with the liberal arts, here creative nonfiction, as he edits a travel book being written by Dickie’s girlfriend, Marge, about picturesque Atrani. (Marge is skeptical about Ripley, in part because he shows up as a tourist without knowing who Caravaggio is.) Ripley not only makes useful suggestions but does so in Marge’s voice, not least by contributing a line about Atrani being a “waking dream” she’ll eventually dedicate to her deceased Dickie. Ripley’s edits make Marge’s draft more her own, and he retitles Atrani to My Atrani, which she also keeps for the published book. He’s a good editor, even if his claim of having worked for Random House is likely made up.

Can the arts make Tom Ripley a good person? Ripley gazes at Picasso’s Guitar Player, which hangs in Dickie’s house, but he ends up most fascinated by Caravaggio. When he looks at Caravaggio’s paintings, we hear disembodied voices, suggesting a presence that might let Ripley finally see people as souls, not surfaces. As Ripley walks through the Galleria Borghese in Rome, a tour guide speaks of David with the Head of Goliath as showing Caravaggio compassionately grasping a relationship between killer and victim; we hope Ripley finds compassion. As Ripley pays ten lire to illumine Caravaggio’s three paintings of St. Matthew in a chapel, a priest walks by and says, “The light. Always the light.” We hope Caravaggio’s “light of the world” belatedly illumines Ripley.

Alas, when Ripley recalls David with the Head of Goliath, it’s to better position a head to pour alcohol down the throat and cover up murder. When Ripley considers The Calling of St. Matthew, Ripley deliberately focuses on the window’s refraction of light, not on Christ’s pointing hand, suggesting he sees The Calling as a painting about painting, not the “light of the world,” and he figures out to use light and shade to disguise his appearance. Thus, his recall of the priest’s “The light. Always the light,” is ironic. Finally, scam complete, Ripley gazes again at Picasso’s Guitar Player, now hanging in his apartment, less to admire Picasso’s cubist representation of multiple perspectives than to fragment it in his mind into different realities, all subject to manipulation and then combined into his successful con. (Marge, the girlfriend and travel writer, is one of those manipulated.) Ripley imagines himself as an artist — Caravaggio. After all, in a manner, he has created art, if through forgery instead of oil.

When Ripley meets a fellow conman, Reeves Minot, the code they use for what they do is “art dealer.”

If the liberal arts are about finding new possibilities and counternarratives, whether in clichéd travel writing or dramatic oil paintings, Ripley can discover them. He is very good at self-invention. If it’s about forming a community of shared and elevated interests, Ripley even has the fellow “art dealer” who enjoys his company and shares his contempt for the hypocrisy of the wealthy. What Ripley has increasingly learned from the liberal arts is what Alasdair MacIntyre calls “a virtue that is a newcomer to the catalogue of the virtues: adaptability, flexibility, knowing chameleon-like how to take on the color of this or that social background.”

If, as one commenter says, “it is difficult to think of a more frequently applauded modern trait,” adaptability is not easy, as it requires the self-discipline to transition from one role to another, or, in Ripley’s case, one identity to another, Tom Ripley to Dickie Greenleaf to Tom Ripley to a “Timothy Fanshaw.” Part of this self-discipline is what MacIntyre sees as “active refusals and denials,” particularly of incoherences. Ripley must set aside what might fasten him to a single, intractable reality or identity —his moral disgust when others try to capitalize on Dickie’s story (he loved Dickie in a way); those disembodied whispers when he looked at Caravaggio’s figures that suggest they are souls, not surfaces.

In Highsmith’s novel, we read of Ripley, “He was afraid of nameless, formless things that haunted his brain like the Furies.” In all the versions of Ripley, including the Netflix one, he has nightmares. These too must be set aside.

If Ripley shouldn’t be a good liberal-arts student, what must our vision of the liberal arts include? A recent collection, The Liberating Arts, written by professors and administrators at Christian colleges, provides answers. First, there’s the awareness of a deeper self — a shift of focus “from career to character,” combined with the distinction of “real work,” service, and community from the pretenses in what the late David Graeber called “bulls—t jobs.” Second, there’s the perception that our stories need to be interpreted by overarching narratives. For instance, Margarita Mooney Clayton recalls how the late Albert Raboteau recognized that recovering spirituals and slave memoirs wasn’t merely “historical” but furthered “the universal search for wisdom and truth,” because our reality is exodus stories. The stability of this deeper self and its “real” work, revealed by those narratives, grounds a virtue that MacIntyre opposes to adaptability: integrity no matter the social context.

Thus, in our second answer to the question of what the liberal arts are for, the liberal arts should show us a telos, in the sense of an ending as completion or perfection, against which we can measure who we’ve become and what we do, not just the fascinating possibilities of self-invention.

What might be an example? If we look at the Book of Job, in the philosopher Eleonore Stump’s reading, we do not see Job learning about new possibilities but rather about the world in which he lives and suffers, a creation he grasps is shot through by divine providence. Mysterious as this is, he learns about it firsthand, and we learn through the re-presenting of his experience and its larger context in narrative. He learns through a series of dialogues, ending with a dialogue with God; we learn from reading the literary text that is the Book of Job. Job is a very different liberal arts student who suggests our second answer to the question of what the liberal arts are for.

Satan attacks Job twice, yet Job remains the same person, retaining integrity — at first, separating his belief in a God of goodness from a god of (now lost) prosperity, and then, as Stump says, even more radically standing “with the goodness of God, rather than with the office of God as ruler of the universe.” Job must reject his friends’ claims that everything that happens is straightforwardly divinely ordained, so that he would have to adapt. As René Girard has pointed out, even Job is tempted to accept the last social role available to him — that of scapegoat: “Though I am innocent, my own mouth would condemn me” (9:20). This adaptability is clearly a lapse, though, for Job’s true self and purpose comes from remaining steadfast in faithfulness to the God of goodness, seemingly unresponsive though he remains.

Gradually, Job learns about the providence that undergirds his integrity. As we learn, we experience the goodness of God through unexpected narrative. For, unbeknownst to Job, his afflictions occur after God asks the returning Satan, like a rebellious child, “Where have you come from?” (1:7), and then asks the accuser to consider “my servant Job.” God seemingly desires to counter Satan’s cynicism; God shows love and concern even for this accuser. When God finally responds to Job, he speaks of his role in all of creation as the parent who “shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb” (38:8). God converses with his creation. God interacts with both darkness and light — “Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are?’” (38:35), as well as with every animal.

In fact, Stump argues the Book of Job has a “fractal nature” with “nested stories” of God’s parental love, one in which God tries to draw the accuser close to himself with Job as his instrument, another in which God seeks to draw Job in his steadfastness closer to himself, with others as secondary characters. Stump writes, “We can suppose that there will be stories, contained within the story of Job, in which each of Job’s children is the primary beneficiary of his or her suffering.”

As opposed to many of our narratives, in which some characters wear “plot armor” and others are expendable, in Job’s world one trusts God is drawing all to himself, however mysteriously. There aren’t non-playing characters, only narratives presently unseen. If Job’s sufferings make him a saint, or a cultural figure on par with Socrates, less likely to imagine misfortune as a curse warranting persecution, so God restores him with more children and possessions that Job can receive as pure gifts from an unconditional goodness, it isn’t only him. We need only remain ourselves in this reality, our deeper selves committed to the work before us. We need not treat ourselves and others with opportunistic flexibility, figuring out whether we and they matter to God.

The question of what the liberal arts are for depends on what we make of reality. Is it a world composed of many different stages demanding varying roles for us to play? Or is it a fractal world in which we maintain integrity?

Behind this lies another question: The soul is hard to find, but can we retain the liberal arts without considering the soul? If we find it, will we find the Ripleyesque hard-working stage manager of many performances, brilliantly evading capture, or the Job-like figure who seems more himself as he becomes steadily — if not painlessly — more receptive to a reality that was always as providential as it was inescapable?

One of today’s lectionary readings, from First Corinthians, raises the question of why the Corinthians were screaming at one another. Why did St. Paul have to ask them to “Consider [their] own call” and “boast” not of themselves but only “in the Lord”? In The Gospel and the Catholic Church, Michael Ramsey suggests the problem is any spiritual gift that draws our focus from what Jesus has done and fragments the body of Christ. A genuine spiritual gift is never a possession to be grasped as ours in isolation from Jesus and our siblings. Instead, it calls us to reflect the unity of God. However, this call must “overcome” us as it first “apprehends [us] through the Cross.” Ramsey even says, channeling Karl Barth, that through this call “the oneness of God triumphs over the whole questionableness of the Church’s history.” So, if we are to stop screaming and try to learn from one another, especially in the absence of crystalline commands — whatever we think of meat sacrificed to idols — the lesson has to involve dying both to self and what we might imagine as the self-sufficiency of the church. Here, Ramsey directs us to baptism (Rom. 6:3, 1 Cor. 12:13) and the Eucharist, through which we learn to “proclaim the Lord’s death” (11:26) and become “one body” (10:17), all at once.

Ramsey writes, “To possess a gift is to feel no pride of possession, for only in the life of the one Body is it of use or of significance; to lack a gift or function is not to feel hurt since the member’s selfhood dies in the one Body.” We, I think, dimly realize we should not be possessive. As Timothy Radcliffe once preached, “If you just keep the gifts for yourself, you subvert the web of gift-giving,” remembering the joke about the kid with the family heirloom: “My grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed.” But our gifts, both individually and within the church, still often serve as instruments of self-justification.

Andrew Blosser, channeling Thorstein Veblen, suggests we too often see spiritual gifts as “positional goods” that become valuable because others don’t have them. This sets up a zero-sum game: “For every satisfied owner of a positional good, there must be at least one other frustrated consumer who wants to possess it and cannot.” (This even leads to nihilism as it entails a desire for further scarcity — ontological decrease, so our rare books might become even rarer.) Thus, Blosser suggests that the Corinthian Eucharist became the site of positional display where those with something ate in an “unworthy manner” (11:27), visibly apart from those with “nothing” and their contrastive “humiliation” (11:22). Instead, Blosser suggests that the Eucharist must be an “intrinsic good” that increases as it is shared, much like friendship, a good joke, or family heirlooms passed down without charge.

For Blosser, we have become idolators when we think God is impressed by our “positional goods.” God desires the unrestricted sharing of “intrinsic goods,” like when we are told, “Let everything that has breath give praise to the <span style=”font-variant:small-caps;”>Lord</span>” (Ps. 150:6). Nevertheless, Veblen’s terminology doesn’t fully capture the danger of Ramsey’s “pride of possession,” because these days seem less openly competitive and materialistic than Veblen’s. There are fewer equivalents of walking sticks and corsets meant to conspicuously show that the gentleman and lady have no need to be productive.

We, however, still have gifts we consider spiritually ours. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett has written about an aspirational class that is less about acquiring material possessions and flaunting upper-class leisure than working hard to attain knowledge and a “higher social, environmental and cultural awareness.” The point is not to live expensively but — if one has less money — to play “an insider’s game of information on local subculture, hole-in-the-wall dive bars and the whereabouts of particular food trucks.” If one gains more funds, she knows to shop at a certain grocery store because of its story of “consumer awareness, an animal rights ethos, environmental consciousness.” More specifically, “Whole Foods allows us to consume our way to a particular type of persona.” After a description of the “religious ritual” of “cupping” at a specialty coffee shop (not Starbucks), Currid-Halkett says of the near-silent tasting of coffees brewed at different temperatures, “All of this is what makes the coffee taste good both physically and metaphysically.”

The problem isn’t with the question of how something tastes “metaphysically,” or the particular values, or that this quickly becomes comical, more about appearing knowledgeable than acquiring any real knowledge — “We will eat the smaller, sadder apples from the farmers’ market because we met the farmer and we know he didn’t put any nasty chemicals on his fruit.” It is that this becomes divisive, as members of the aspiring class assume their values are “shared by all Americans” and cultivate an “implicit sanctimony” that prevents them from recognizing others who cannot afford their knowledge. Poignantly, Currid-Halkett reminds her reader that an aspirational parent may self-consciously abstain from giving her child mass-market chicken nuggets, but “it’s not that low-income parents aren’t aware of the benefits of children eating vegetables and ‘healthy food,’ it’s that they can’t afford the waste if the children refuse to eat or throw it on the floor,” as the children will do with the first several attempts at “more virtuous foods.” A church may also exclude those who cannot afford entrée into the moral universe of authenticity, conscientiousness, nonchalant worldliness, and romanticized minimalism.

As Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood wrote, if we no longer recognize the poor, it is because “we have selected against them in the constituting of our consumption rituals and have declined invitations to join their celebrations.” (As Jonathan Malesic has more recently reported from Pennsylvania, “real solidarity is harder than it looks.”)

If it remains deceptively easy to celebrate exclusive rituals and subtly retain what Ramsey calls “pride of possession,” here of knowledge and culture, we require dispossessive rituals, such as baptism and the Eucharist. Christopher Wells has written that First Corinthians presents a “sacramental itinerary” in which we are reformed in Christ through an “ascetical curriculum,” first as we discover humility in being confronted with the “foolishness” of Christ’s cross (1 Cor. 1:23) and then as we are “baptized in his death” (Rom. 6:3). The Corinthians’ attention has to continually be drawn “back to where they began in the font,” especially as they navigate neuralgic quarrels that otherwise become stages for self-assertion and exclusion.

For Wells, we have been invited to be “remade” to become responsive to what God has first told us in Christ — “we are to think like Christ, and on that account to act like him: emptying and humbling ourselves in order to be obedient to the end.” This “design and redesign” means that as we speak “we curiously understand him still to be himself speaking as well — inviting, permitting, and even uttering our speech through us.” For Wells, this remains clearest in the ritual of baptism. After all, we are baptized “in” God’s name by saying it — “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” and “we say God’s name endlessly thereafter in worship and prayer: ‘Holy Trinity, one God;’ ‘Jesus;’ ‘Lord.’”

Then, the Corinthians can only share in the Eucharist, “waiting for one another” (11:33), if they have come to see that the “meal’s communicants are bound to the Lord’s sacrifice, passion, and death,” and thus to one another, at long last reflecting the unity of God

The Corinthians were likely yelling at one another because they still considered themselves, in Ramsey’s words, “separate ‘selfhoods’ — (I, mine, he, his) — instead of knowing themselves to be nothing.” If, one the other hand, one realizes that, through baptism, she has at once been immersed into physical water, Christ’s death, and new life in a rather immersive form of belonging, perhaps she can no longer play zero-sum games with either possessions or her knowledge and culture. She no longer shouts at the other, because, as Rowan Williams would say, there’s a genuine desire to learn from what the other person has learned, however disturbing or promising, even about meat sacrificed to idols, because this other person too has been immersed and overwhelmed, and she finds herself “remade” to offer space, even for this stranger.

What she has learned, what this other person has learned, what I might be coming to learn, through what Christopher Wells would call our “ascetic curriculum,” is no longer just our own.

Thus, for Archbishop Temple, Christmas isn’t just about Santa Claus and stockings. Christmas is about recognizing the danger, spiritual and political, in our self-centeredness. About his distressed times, Temple claimed “the liberty that rests on selfhood and self-assertiveness is doomed, and justly doomed.” That selfish liberty had resulted in the political corruption and paralysis that Mussolini and Hitler replaced with the idolatry of the state. Temple will even say that self-centeredness is Original Sin itself.

What then are we to do about it?

In his Christianity and Social Order (1942), which quickly sold over 139,000 copies as a paperback that “could be slipped into a back pocket,” Archbishop Temple recognizes that education broadens horizons and commits us to truth and beauty. Yet, even then, the self remains “still the center and standard of reference.” So, Temple says, “complete deliverance can be effected only by the winning of my whole heart’s devotion, the total allegiance of my will — and this only the Divine Love disclosed by Christ in His Life and Death can do.” Thus, the social order may require Christ born in a stable, not Augustus Caesar and his legions, even if Temple considered Augustus relatively “merciful and gentle.”

This “whole heart’s devotion,” the “total allegiance of my will,” calls for worship. Worship through, in, and with Christ is a form of consecration — “industry and commerce no less than family and friendship,” and eucharistic. We not only offer our lives to God, who returns them to us as “agents of His purpose, limbs or a body responsive to His will,” but we specifically offer bread and wine to receive Christ’s body and blood to transform our self-centeredness into an abiding with Christ. Temple says of how we normally reflect and imagine, “All this is gathered up in that emotion which most cleanses us from selfishness because it is the most selfless of all emotions—adoration.” Ordinary prayer, too, must dislodge the self; “we more and more let self-dedication take the place of petition for ourselves.”

About Christmas, then, Temple recognizes a “feast for children” and the warmth of family reunions, but he also asks us to “be very sure that we keep in mind the deeper truth from which all our celebrations spring.” There’s the danger that Christmas becomes “a dreamland of unreal beauty,” whereas our endurance of the “harsh realities of the world” may depend on the radically transformative power of its central mystery.

Today’s lectionary readings for the Feast of St. John have Jesus repeatedly telling Peter to “Follow me,” and note a perplexing “rumor spread in the community that this [Beloved] disciple would not die.” In his Readings in St. John’s Gospel (1939-40), Temple interprets John 21 in terms of St. Peter’s transformation from self-centeredness. Peter begins with work that is “self-chosen” — “I am going fishing” (21:3) — and catches nothing, as if to show, “The work which we do at the impulse of our own wills is futile.” Jesus then appears as an ordinary stranger; Peter, upon recognizing him, behaves with “characteristic impetuosity.” Reviewing Peter’s entire experience with Jesus, Temple sees both “passionate loyalty” and still a “vein of self-will,” for our passions may remain “possessive or self-assertive in some degree” — “You will never wash my feet” (13:8) — and lead to failure. Peter denies Jesus three times. (Earlier in his commentary, Temple had noted the danger in even very pious forms of loyalty; he quotes a sermon from Bishop Charles Gore: “To be the inheritors of a great tradition gives men heroism, and it gives them blindness of heart.”)

The memory of Peter’s self-will and failure shadow Jesus’ questions to him in John 21. In response, Peter, who had once declared, “Though all become deserters because of you, I will never desert you” (Matt 26:33), now refuses any comparison with others, even if Jesus asks him if he loves him more than others. Peter also does not claim to love Jesus with the self-forgetfulness of agape. Instead, “he uses the word of simple friendship,” philia. Jesus then asks Peter if he loves him, without any comparisons. Peter gives the same answer. Jesus asks a third time, using Peter’s word philia, echoing Peter’s threefold denial. Peter says, penitent but still trustful, “You see that I am your friend.” He can now be charged with the full responsibility of feeding Jesus’ sheep, instead of just feeding the younger lambs, or generally tending the sheep, because the mature sheep “often have no knowledge of what their own needs are, or, still worse, suppose that they know when in fact they do not,” and, finally, Peter can be their friend. Temple had written of the shepherd, “The test comes when he has to choose between his own interest and that of the flock,” and Peter, somewhat past his self-will, is ready for such a test.

Peter had once himself been “willful and headstrong,” with impulses that were generous, but “he followed them as much because they were his as because they were generous.” Now he can and must follow another, even to the point of martyrdom. As for the Beloved Disciple’s perplexing future, though, Peter remains curious. However, Temple points out, “The Lord does not answer speculative questions or satisfy curiosity.”

Temple writes of Jesus, Peter, and John:

So the story of this Gospel ends with a little group standing apart from the company of the disciples. It consists of three: the Lord of love; the disciple in whom self would be offered; and the disciple in whom self would be forgotten.

“If we are to enter into the life to which the Lord Jesus incites us, the self in us must be eliminated as a factor in the determination of conduct,” yet this proves to be so difficult, Peter remains a source of encouragement for us. If John is the disciple “in whom self would be forgotten,” simply and naturally, Peter is far more relatable.

Temple’s focus on the self explains a memorable line from his Readings, that “St. John is strongly anti-mystical.” What Temple means by “mystical” is a “direct apprehension of God by the human mind.” The problem is that our minds are so “distorted by self-will” that seeking “a supposedly direct communion with God in detachment from all external aids” cannot free us from “distortions.” As Rowan Williams paraphrases, “the mind which takes itself for its own object in seeking clues about the divine nature will fail and fail dangerously.” For Temple, then, we must “avail ourselves of the true Mediator,” who is nothing less than life itself, a humanity that we must make our own. In fact, for Temple, the “distinctively Eucharistic discourse” in John’s Gospel is when Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches” (15:4), because it here is clear that what is important is “permanent abiding,” eating and drinking as sacramental signs of communion between we who “have no life in ourselves” and the Source of all life. (Temple fears the sacraments becoming magical objects that can be manipulated by the unchanged self.)

Temple’s focus on the self, and his wartime claim that “our selfish hearts must be penetrated and then filled by the energy of His love” if we are to defend freedom and direct it to fellowship, also mark an important contribution to social thought. The political difficulty is that we are so self-centered that we either fragment society or turn in reaction to authoritarian idolatry. Temple asks how we find a candidate to perform the “double function” of fostering both individual development and fellowship. He does not wish to impose Christianity, for Christianity is about Christ, not Roman emperors. Nevertheless, Christianity remains the only candidate for this “double function,” for it frees the self from self-centeredness to love all those whom God loves, so society depends on those who have freely found redemption and show the possibility of a life that no longer centers itself. As signs of this sacrificial love, Temple sees the ecumenical movement and “the fellowship of Chinese and Japanese Christians while their nations are at war.”

The self, though, has a way of imperiously returning to self-centeredness. Ironically, even as Temple writes, “We never know who is doing the greatest work for God,” one of his examples is predictably gendered: “And there is a girl, poor and uneducated, of whom no one ever thinks; but because she is loving and devout she sows the seed of life in a child entrusted to her care who grows up to be a missionary pioneer, or Christian statesman, or profound theologian — shaping the history of nations or the thought of generations.” This is not to impose anachronistic standards on Temple. If Temple realizes that for his war-torn world, as opposed to that of an earlier generation, “no Christian map can be made,” and “here the figure of the Kingdom is the Cross,” nevertheless his examples feature neither outcasts nor those who subject his world to radical critique.

Perhaps, on this Feast of St. John, we might remember that St. John, whom William Temple likens to a portraitist, selflessly gives a better picture of St. Peter than he does of himself. He is the bearer of tradition because he is “the disciple in whom self would be forgotten.” And, on Christmas, we might recall that the birth of the Savior reminds us that, even amid world wars, “We do not have to conquer this evil world in any strength of ours,” because any force of ours would leave intact what only Love decenters.

In a distinctly sad moment in Dead Poets Society (1989), Peter Weir’s film about John Keating, an inspiring if ill-fated English teacher at Welton Academy, a 100-year-old prep school ensconced amid open fields and fog-shrouded woods and a cave beyond a stream, a student notices the newly fallen snow, says, “So beautiful,” and vomits. That might also describe the reaction of many of the film’s critics. Earlier this year, in the Jesuit-run America, Elizabeth Grace Matthew recognizes that Dead Poets Society is a “beautifully filmed and affecting movie,” but suggests that Keating’s teaching, all about seizing the day (Carpe diem) and thinking for yourself, leads to “solipsistic, faux introspection” that, ironically, fosters not individualism but becoming a pale imitation of Mr. Keating.

In a 2014 article in The Atlantic, Kevin J.H. Dettmar acknowledges one can get “swept up in the autumnal New England beauty of Welton Academy,” but argues the film teaches “passion alone, divorced from the thrilling intellectual work of real analysis,” noting that Keating misinterprets Robert Frost’s oft-misinterpreted “The Road Not Taken” as a paean to nonconformity. For Keating, “every poem is a Song of Myself.” Like Matthew, Dettmar suggests Keating “actually allows his students very little opportunity for original thought” — they just ironically follow Keating’s iconoclastic curriculum, sequentially stepping up to a desk to see the world in a new way, waiting in line to recite poetry before kicking a ball, walking oddly in the courtyard in collective nonconformity.

Recalling that Robin Williams played both John Keating and Peter Pan, Dettmar writes, “On some level, Keating is a Lost Boy who refuses to grow up.” A decade earlier, in The American Scholar, Robert B. Heilman likewise saw Keating as less teaching than drawing students into a performance, so Dead Poets Society is finally about his and his students’ adolescent escapism: “What we see is moonlight larks and forest frolics — midsummer nights’ dream fantasies taken for actualities.”

Some of these criticisms are unfair (Keating does misinterpret the “most misread poem in America”). Keating’s students do not simply copy him nor proceed on a single path. Many of their actions are rightly portrayed as badly juvenile — the first meeting of the reconstituted Dead Poets Society in the cave beyond the stream includes a risqué pinup photo, campfire stories, and, as Dettmar points out, ill-advised chanting from the 1919 poem “The Congo.” After a prank at a school assembly, Keating must gently intervene: “Sucking the marrow out of life doesn’t mean choking on the bone.” As William C. Pamerleau writes in Existentialist Cinema, Dead Poets Society shows that becoming a free spirit means recognizing that, as Keating puts it, “being expelled from school is not daring.” Furthermore, distinguishing individualism from recklessness calls for guidance from a mentor and friends. Keating is not a pied piper, nor does he nostalgically evoke the spontaneity of a lost childhood.

Keating’s teaching is also not contentless. To dismiss Keating’s teaching as mere “passion” is to claim that imagination plays no role in thought at all. One of his students, Neil Perry, is moved to act, against his father’s wishes, in a local production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after which he tells himself, “I was good. I was really good.” This is not a feeling but a judgment, which echoes what Neil’s audience had thought, and Keating had taught him to find this excellence to be meaningful.

Another of Keating’s students, Todd Anderson, is encouraged by Keating to improvise a poem, and finally utters, “Truth is like, like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold.” Bert Olivier writes that in successfully creating this poem, Todd develops an awareness of the tragedy of the human condition and a new sense of self. (Immediately before, Mr. Keating had noticed, “Mr. Anderson thinks that everything inside of him is worthless and embarrassing.”) Now, Todd can grasp novel possibilities, which will prove crucial for the film’s famous last scene.

All this should make us ask again what Mr. Keating’s charismatic teaching gets right and what it gets wrong. We should also ask what Mr. Keating’s successes and failures mean theologically.

In a lecture delivered in Florence in 1955, four years before Dead Poets Society is set, Josef Pieper spoke on despair in a way relevant to (fictional) New England boarding schools. Borrowing from Kierkegaard, Pieper speaks of a “despair from weakness” that appears as acedia, or sloth, here meaning not laziness but a “sloth of the heart.” This is a resistance to self-realization. From the refusal to be whom God calls us, Pieper suggests, we are not at rest — not at home with ourselves — and we turn instead to “the programmatic absolutizing of the ideal of work and the degenerate curiosity for spectacle.” We also adopt a “forced optimism” about life and the future.

Welton Academy seems to be a place about, as the banners in its opening ceremony proclaim, “tradition,” “honor,” “discipline,” “excellence,” and dispersing, as is ritually done in the same ceremony, “the light of knowledge.” Yet the headmaster, Mr. Nolan, then declares, a bit discordantly, that the number of graduates who attend the Ivy League is why parents send their children to Welton and why Welton is the “best preparatory school in the United States.” Welton is less traditional than single-mindedly pre-professional, often preparing boys for the same professions their fathers have, so when Mr. Nolan warns Mr. Keating about the dangers of thinking for oneself, he begins by invoking “tradition” and “discipline,” but concludes with cold practicality, “Prepare them for college, and the rest will take care of itself.”

Several characters seem only able to talk of their jobs or college prospects, even to girls in a cave: “Uh, I might be going to Yale. Uh, uh, but, I might not.” If the villain of the film is Neil Perry’s father, who, because of his lack of opportunities, pushes Neil to go to Harvard and become a doctor, he only makes explicit the ethos of Welton — something like what Pieper called “the programmatic absolutizing of the ideal of work.” As for spectacle, when Mr. Keating criticizes the poetry textbook by “Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D.” and has the students rip out the first chapter, he associates its self-satisfied graphing of a poem’s perfection and greatness with the consumerist fascinations of American Bandstand: “I like Byron, I give him a 42, but I can’t dance to it.”

So, when Keating speaks of “passion,” it is not anti-intellectual but meant to evoke a self that is not narrowly pre-professional or conventional. Business and law and medicine remain “noble pursuits,” Keating tells his class, but “poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” Thus, his students, finding new possibilities for meaning, are able to take newfound pleasure in being “really good” in a play, even if it is unremunerative, and grasp the tragedy of the human condition, even if it leads Todd to see the enormity in persisting after Mr. Keating is fired. (Todd then risks expulsion by standing on his desk and shouting, “O Captain! My Captain!” — a scene memorable enough to be parodied a quarter century later.) In his recent book on Pieper, Nathaniel Warne writes that the opposite of acedia is in responding to God’s call — “the joyous affirmation of creation, the existence of the whole world, and of a God who is love.” That might serve as a clarification and deepening of Keating’s “passion.”

Pieper then speaks of hope, and here we might see what goes wrong in John Keating’s teaching. For Pieper, hope means that all shall be well, but we must speak of a “hidden,” inescapably theological hope because the evil in our world inclines it toward disaster. With the world as it is, “the real act of the brave man is not attack but standing firm,” even to the point of a martyrdom that in the eyes of the world seems completely hopeless. “Behold, I send you as sheep among wolves” (Matt 10:16). The martyr combines three elements: “The real object of hope is eternal life and not some kind of well-being that can be found in the world”; a “readiness for a catastrophic end caused by forces within our history”; and, finally, that whatever happens, the martyr will affirm God’s creation. The capacity for patient endurance, Pieper will say, grants the Christian detachment and freedom.

Some of Mr. Keating’s students are resilient, such as Todd, who after being forced to denounce his teacher by Mr. Nolan and his otherwise uninvolved parents, still stands for him at the end, and Knox Overstreet, who continues to romantically — if at times, gracelessly — pursue Chris, a girl for whom he has suddenly fallen in love, not least with poetry. Nevertheless, the main character of the film is Neil Perry, whose Keating-inspired pursuit of acting in spite of his overbearing father leads to his suicide. As Stephanie Gauper writes, there is a way to see Neil’s death as tragically inevitable. Peter Weir’s films often share the idea that “highly evolved persons get run over by history.” When Neil kills himself, he first opens a window to the winter chill that represents the freeze of Welton and his family, his physical form representing “a spiritual and natural beauty that dies as it collides with historical time.”

On the other hand, this death hardly seems inevitable. Neil avoided confronting his father on three separate occasions — when he instead forges a permission note to act in the play, as he assumes his father will not be in town to see his illicit performance, and, finally, when his father, post-performance, angrily asks him to tell him what he feels, and Neil falsely responds with “Nothing.” The only time Neil seems to speak honestly to his father is on stage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Puck — as an actor playing a Trickster. In a deleted scene, Neil says that, as an actor, if he gets the parts, “He can live dozens of great lives.” In a film about committing to one’s mortal life — “Carpe diem,” “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” — Neil simply cannot commit to his life, perhaps as its significance has been choked off by the controlling presence of his father. (NB: the filmmakers rightly chose to avoid portraying the suicide as in any way heroic.)

Why doesn’t Keating anticipate the problem? Keating had judiciously encouraged Neil to speak to his father, lest he simply end up “acting for him … playing the part of the dutiful son.” Neil lies to Keating and says he had. Keating seems to suspect otherwise but curiously fails to act. The answer might be that Keating had himself managed to navigate Welton and expects others will too. In the school yearbook his students find, he is labeled a rabblerouser, but also captain of the soccer team, editor of the school newspaper, and “Cambridge bound.” He voluntarily returns to Welton to teach. His experiments in nonconformity notably make use of the school — the photographs in the lobby, the courtyard, the playing fields — and he directs his ire at figures outside of Welton (like Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D.).

One of the film’s critics, Robert B. Heilman, notes, if Keatings need institutions in which to teach, institutions need Keatings to maintain the affections of the otherwise disaffected: “One Great Teacher, as it were, redeems the place otherwise thought to be too much in the hands of routinists and dullards often asserted to be indifferent to student interests and needs.” Welton and Keating can live together as school and in-house dissident in ways Neil and his father simply cannot.

Neil must find the patient endurance to either confront and sever relations with his father or accept his harsh rule (“After you’ve finished medical school and you’re on your own, then you can do as you damn well please”). If Keating never teaches theology, he is never seen teaching tragedy, either. It remains unclear what resources he would offer to Neil once his advice to “show him who you are, what your heart is” does not work, how he would instruct Neil to go on, shattered but affirming and still alive.

What is right and wrong in Mr. Keating’s teaching? It is unfair to say that Keating is solipsistic, anti-intellectual, or a modern-day Peter Pan. His invocations of “passion” make sense as affirmations in a place marked by “despair from weakness.” What Keating does not grasp is that the world often lacks a place for passion, and passion can lead to catastrophe. Tellingly, even if Todd’s improvised poetry — “Truth is like, like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold” — left his classmates silently moved, Keating never incorporates it into a lesson. The perception of tragedy, that “it’ll never cover any of us,” means that we are called to patient endurance in this world, even at high cost. As Josef Pieper writes, “the real act of the brave man is not attack but standing firm,” and sometimes it is standing firm on top of a desk.

If Christians are called to unity (John 17:21), presumably churches should be able to learn from one another. Can churches learn from one another?

One answer is only superficially positive. Yes, churches can use one another to strategically position themselves as golden means between two opposing extremes. Likewise, ecclesial factions can use other churches, whether as exemplars or warnings, to steer their own churches in the preferred direction. A bit more constructively, we might imagine churches cagily learning from one another in safely managed ecumenism: liturgy, but without hierarchy; monasticism without monastic vows; exegesis without categorical definitions of scriptural authority. None of these forms of learning, however, involves conversion, only the careful negotiation of existing boundaries. And, as the Archbishop of Canterbury has said, “Ecumenism that looks as though it is about the negotiation of frontiers is an ecumenism that is based on theological foundations of sand.”

As Archbishop Welby notes, divisions inevitably call attention to themselves and away from our only stable foundation in Jesus Christ. “Like the evil fairy in so many folk stories that comes to the birth or christening of a princess, division waves its wand, and the world turns to look at the Church itself and does not much like what it sees.”

Can churches really learn from one another? One option is receptive ecumenism, which is now the path of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, which, as Archbishop Welby says, “looks beyond those frontiers and asks what it is that we can receive from another church or tradition.” For its leading theologian, Paul Murray, receptive ecumenism is a “Kennedy-style reversal” (JFK, not RFK Jr.) — “Ask not what your ecumenical others need to learn from you; ask rather what your tradition can learn and needs to learn from your ecumenical others.” This, Murray continues, brings “self-criticism and conversion” into an ecclesial life that might thus be drawn closer to unity in Christ.

A recent edited collection, Receptive Learning as Transformative Ecclesial Learning, demonstrates the promise of receptive ecumenism yet shows an interesting tension in imagining what it should look like, particularly the place of self-emptying within it.

Catherine E. Clifford writes that receptive ecumenism requires an openness and humility that only comes with conversion from false images of church and self. She cites a former co-chair of the ecumenical Groupe des Dombes: “Every conversion … involves a dying to self and a welcome of the living God,” and, thus, ecumenism necessarily involves “death to our confessional egotism.” “This,” she says, “is not horse-trading.” Elsewhere, Clifford, again following Dombes, recommends ecumenism follow a theology of kenosis (Phil. 2:2-8) — self-emptying — to emulate Jesus’ rejection of the “popular messianism of his time,” including his refusal to make himself “the focus of his own preaching,” in order to place radical trust in his Father. Now, Clifford writes, we should ask, “Of what, in our time are our ecclesial selves called to be emptied?”

Murray, though, worries the approach of the Groupe des Dombes first prioritizes “emptying” rather than “overflowing fulfilling — always from fullness to fullness” and then imagines forsaking ecclesial identities rather than appreciating their plurality. For Murray, the “motivational basis” of receptive ecumenism is not only acknowledging egotism in one’s own church but also following “pragmatic self-interest” because of the possibilities in other churches. It is “both repentant recognition and the dreaming of dreams.” Afterward, ecclesial identity is not simply cast aside for the other but “enhanced by that which is fluent of grace in another,” so unity is finally imagined as a family Christmas tree full of accidental ornaments brought into decorative harmony. Elsewhere, Murray has argued that renunciation, whenever necessary, always be accompanied by awareness of participating in transformative, joyous love. He quotes Teilhard de Chardin: “It was a joy to me, Lord, in the midst of my struggles, to feel that in growing to my own fulfilment I was increasing your hold on me.”

Concerns about the theological use of kenosis are well-founded, whether they focus on self-emptying as the justification of suffering as paradoxically meaningful (Karen Kilby) or positing a strictly zero-sum competition between the good of the self and the good of others (John Barclay). But why then does the Groupe des Dombes draw on self-emptying in the first place? Does it have a role in receptive ecumenism?

In For the Conversion of the Churches (1991), the Groupe des Dombes distinguishes Christian identity, marked by conversion, from ecclesial identity, which is at once at the service of Christian identity and “vulnerable to the givens of psychosociology,” particularly the tendency of a church to “safeguard its own identity jealously and to be little open to the share of truth present in its partner.” Thus, in ecclesial identity, which then takes confessional form, “‘the alienable share of truth’ which is present in each church is always liable to be the point of its own perversion.” The Prodigal Son lost his identity just as he grasped for it in claiming his inheritance, beginning his journey to the “distant country”; his elder brother lost his own hard-won filial identity when he refused to share it with his wayward sibling. Jesus tells Peter, “Get behind me, Satan” (Matt. 16:18) just after Peter confesses that Jesus is Messiah and gains status. “On this rock I will build my church” (16:17). What is good and true, given its reception in all-too-human hands, can become the instrument of self-justification. (Likewise, in Matthew 25, the goats seem to be those who assumed they were sheep. As Donald MacKinnon notes, “The irony is devastating.”)

If ecclesial identity thus requires purification, Christian identity is always “opening up to an eschatological beyond which … prevents it from shutting itself up in itself.” The ecclesial identity that is in service to Christian identity is itself an “eschatological gift” and never a possession and cannot be given up. Nor should any church ever be asked to do this.

The need for self-emptying, then, is because churches must sacrifice not merely unreasonable prejudice, unbalanced theologies, and overly harsh words. Instead, they must grasp there is not a single theology, that “even the best and most carefully chosen words must be the objects of understanding, not veneration,” and “how to be silent or rather how to say what is essential at the appropriate moment.” What must be surrendered is the deep-rooted “spirit of controversy,” so the Groupe des Dombes suggests ecumenism depends on kairoi, like that of Vatican II — a “thunderbolt of grace” — and “symbolic gestures of conversion and reconciliation,” as when the Pope gave the Archbishop of Canterbury his episcopal ring even as official Catholic thought deemed Anglican orders null and void.

So, the Groupe des Dombes recognizes that Christian identity is a “shifting of the centre, an exodus, a transition, a paschal movement,” and ecclesial identity, where conversion is present incompletely, remains a place of vulnerability. This causes tension with Murray’s receptive ecumenism. If God reaches us through the same confession and fellowship that congeal into “confessionalism” and “denominationalism,” we might need caution toward what first appears as fullness, caters to pragmatic self-interest, or excites what Murray calls “loving, even erotic, desire” for communion. After all, ecumenism can be pursued with uncertain motives, whether in the form of what the Archbishop of Canterbury calls the “negotiation of frontiers,” which leaves the other safely across a frontier, or an “ecumenism of action” that becomes self-congratulatory niceness and usefulness. Ecumenism can have unforeseen results. Perhaps the most challenging contribution to Receptive Ecumenism as Transformative Ecclesial Learning is Gabrielle Thomas’s discussion of the Church of England’s attempt to both ordain women and offer pastoral care for those opposed to women’s ordination. What is officially described as (and sincerely believed to be) “mutual flourishing” may be a zero-sum game.

Thus, what Murray calls a “pragmatic-pneumatic conjunction of need and desire” may have to presuppose a continual recentering of desire not unlike “self-emptying.”

David Ford’s contribution to the collection may suggest a Johannine reconciliation of Dombes and Murray, as he sees “the whole Gospel can be read as an education of desire.” John’s Gospel, Ford says, centers on unity but does not present detailed ethical teaching. Instead, John recommends “a practice of improvisation that trusts believers to discern together in the Spirit what the parallels and analogies are between the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and their own times and places.” This practice never holds an abstract belief as a form of self-justification against other Christians, as its main imperative remains the disarmingly noncompetitive and non-possessive act of foot-washing — “Nothing else in the Gospel of John is insisted upon like this.” The presence of foot-washing rather than an account of the Last Supper may even caution Christians that communion requires not only sacrament but also the “strange, challenging, indirect sign” of “humble, loving service.” After all, earlier in John’s Gospel, the difference between the man born blind and the Pharisees is the man “has nothing to lose in the encounter with Jesus and so is open to who Jesus is,” while the Pharisees retain “much to lose and therefore much to protect” (here, Ford quotes the exegete Gail O’Day).

Ecumenism is no exception to our tendencies toward self-deception and arguably, given the history of Christian division, may serve as the vehicle for rivalry and self-justification. The question, then, is whether we trust ourselves to make well-intentioned efforts to recognize the elements of grace and truth in other churches without first adopting an ethos of self-emptying.

The particular if not unique strength of Anglicanism for the ecumenical project may be to foster traditions of self-emptying. Then, as Eugene Schlesinger has written, we might habitually imagine ecclesial humility and even death, not from rejection of fullness or plurality, but in hopes of “a transcendence in a wider catholic reality … a great fullness” that we cannot presently imagine, but only gesture towards in actions such as foot-washing or the giving of an episcopal ring.

When Archbishop Welby says, “We tie ourselves down through our inability to imagine who we really are,” the first step for churches that hope to learn from one another in receptive ecumenism may be to grasp the paralyzing extent of this inability. Perhaps, in the end, receptive ecumenism can and must first receive kenosis for us to truly learn and cease drawing attention to our divided selves rather than Jesus Christ.