Kathleen Jolley Fox, 1945-2025

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent] 

By the time my youngest brother, Baden, and I arrived at the Spokane Valley Hospital in Washington state on Thursday, November 13, 2025, our mother, Kathleen Jolley Fox, was no longer truly communicating with others. Baden and I, residents of Nevada and Kansas respectively, had the furthest to travel out of our seven other siblings to get to our mother’s bedside. Afterward he and I spoke with each other, wishing that we’d called from the airport that morning, just for the chance to speak with Mom before she began her final decline. But at least we were able to be there with all our brothers and sisters when she passed away, and that was the most important thing.

Like all my siblings, I had time to hold my mother’s hand and listen to her breathing slowly weaken throughout the afternoon. She had still been conscious and speaking with my siblings that morning, following the family conversation on Zoom the previous Wednesday evening, when our mother decided, in agreement with the doctors tending to her, not to pursue another, rather risky surgery, and instead to forego any further curative care. There was no discussion or announcement following that call, but we all independently recognized our need to journey quickly to our old home state of Washington, to be part of the inevitable. But after the pain drugs she was given around mid-morning, she fell into a slow torpor, which continued for more than a day, well into Thursday. I don’t know if she was ever even aware of me while holding her hand, on and off, during those hours. I hope so, but do not know.

When one of her oldest grandchildren, McKenna, a daughter of my brother Stuart, arrived at our deathwatch later on Thursday afternoon, Mom surprisingly rallied enough to say her name. She also, that evening, as discussion was taking place about who would stay in her hospital room overnight, unexpectedly responded to a question, and said that she wanted her second daughter, Marjorie, to stay. And then, very early on Friday morning, as nurses moved our mother to prevent bed sores and check her dressings, she moaned and struggled and pushed back loudly. But other than that, there was no interaction with her children or grandchildren or anyone else around her, nothing that could give Baden and I any reason to hope for a final connection before her end.

Except, actually, for one other interaction, one that stays with me strongly, though it was completely silent. It involved another one of my brothers, Philip, who on Thursday afternoon attempted to give our mother some ice chips, seeing as she hadn’t eaten or drank anything since first thing in the morning. I was standing nearby her bed when this happened, and saw Mom’s reaction. Her eyes were suddenly sharp, shooting daggers at Philip; she tightened her closed mouth, shook her head, and her hand and fingers flailed in opposition, rebuking his efforts. I watched this, and thought: she’s dying, and knows she’s dying; she can feel herself passing away, and wants it, and absolutely does not want anyone, not even a beloved child, to interrupt or prolong the process. What I heard, silently, was very clear: leave me alone; I’m done; let me go.

 **** 

When I was in high school and competed in debate, our tournaments were almost always held on university campuses, and during our tournaments, I would always strive to find the time to visit the college’s bookstore. I loved those stores, and the environment of intellectual advancement and adventure that wandering down their stacks of books enabled me to conjure up. I would pretentiously pick up academic copies of classic texts, imagining the day when I would be taking classes in history and literature and philosophy far beyond that which my high school offered. So it wasn’t surprising that one day, I think in my sophomore year, I came home with a complete copy of Dante’s Divina Commedia (the classic John Ciardi translation). 

What was surprising is that I actually read it, all three volumes, unlike so many books that crowded my shelves and which I probably enjoyed at least as much for being able to run my fingers along them, reading their titles and feeling their pages, as for anything I could learn from their contents. I didn’t purchase them because I had any preternatural interest in late Medieval poetry; actually, I probably bought those volumes solely because of a comic book that made use of Inferno in describing the origin of a particularly diabolical super-villain. Nonetheless, I not only read all the way to the end of the first book, but worked my way through Purgatorio and Paradiso as well–and one part of the latter has never left me. 

In the final two volumes of the Commedia, Dante’s imaginary travelogue through the afterlife, his guide has been Beatrice, his muse. But towards the conclusion of his vision of heaven Beatrice ascends beyond him, and Dante is ushered into the Empyrean, wherein dwells God Himself. Dante’s eyes are enabled to behold a beatific vision: a realm of pure light and pure love, wherein all the angels and saints and saved are arrayed, outward and endlessly and all around, like petals of a glorious, cosmic, celestial rose. All is fulfilled; all is in a state of perfection. And of those within this state of celestial grace, Dante writes:

There is a light above, which makes / Visible the Creator unto every creature / Who only in beholding Him has peace (Paradiso, canto 30, lines 100-102) 

It’s difficult to figure out exactly why this invocation of divine peace has stayed with me for so long. Much of it, surely, is tied up in the many complicated ways I have, over the decades, tried to situate my own sense of God's creation and purposes within my own spiritual experiences, my membership in the Mormon church, my always-evolving understandings of scripture. But at least part of the reason it has stayed with me, I’m certain, is Mom. 

**** 

Ours was a very patriarchal family, though mostly in a default rather than an intentional manner. There were seven boys and two girls in the Fox family, and our father, James Russell “Jim” Fox, was charismatic and commanding, though not someone who strove to be comprehensively involved in the lives of his children. So long as our basic behavioral choices (church-attending, tithe-paying, only-other-members-dating, etc.) reflected his and Kathleen’s deep commitment to the LDS Church–and almost without exception, our choices did–perfect obedience and perfect harmony were not something Dad expended a great deal of consistent time or energy attempting to achieve. Predictably, especially when one adds the variables of being raised in the 1970s and 1980s on farms that had plenty of open pasture and thick woods and multiple mostly empty old buildings to wander around, hide, and plot revenge in, ours was a family of young men (and, occasionally, our sisters as well) who were regularly shouting at, fighting with, and sometimes bleeding on each other.

Mom did not deal well with all this chaos, though some years were better than others. She loved her children absolutely; she had nine, she said many times, and would have had more if her health had allowed, because she was always curious about, delighted by, and genuinely in love with whatever the next one would look like, and how she or he would turn out. But the constant craziness and near-constant contention of her children as we grew up was absolutely wearying to her, and her own inability to respond to it correctly, at least in her mind–to keep the house clean, to keep the children orderly, to keep herself presentable, and so forth–filled her with frustration. (She would reminisce with me occasionally in later years about how she would go into my bedroom while I was growing up, and just sit quietly on my bed, soaking up the calm environment created by her–then and still–somewhat obsessively neat-freak son.)

In retrospect, perhaps one of the ways she sought to balance out the weariness and frustration was with snark. It was so common for her to follow her husband’s lead, to stay silent when he spoke, that the times when she would issue a joke or reproach or a sarcastic correction would always come as a surprise, which only added to their sharpness. Kathleen absolutely had passions and interests and opinions that went far beyond the patriarchal, mid-20th-century conservative Mormon world that she committed herself too and firmly identified with; I hope that for most of her married life, those other aspects of her personality provided an alternative to her always feeling the full weight of every choice, every mistake, every argument, every conflict that her children were drawn into (or just came up with on their own). The fact that she was, by and large, during the busiest years of our growing up, to my memory mostly a happy and kind and laughing woman, gives me reason to believe that was so. Still, the weariness and the sadness that attended it was undeniable as well.

Once, during a family meeting wherein Dad was attempting to lead his rambunctious brood in developing a family motto, Mom, who had written “Love One Another” on a pad of paper where she was keeping track of suggestions, scratched it out as the family meeting descended into another one of its all-too-frequent bouts of chaos, and wrote “Hate One Another” in its place. (This was not an unique instance; throughout her life, Mom kept lists, writing down inspirational quotes, or conversely, recording of how sad life with the Foxes, with all the sometimes disappointing–to her, that is–choices they made, could be.) Add to this her long struggles with health issues, with being overweight, with what would almost certainly be diagnosed today as depression, and the fact that some of her children’s strongest memories of her are not necessarily her reliable expressions of love–which were never doubted–but rather those moments when her joy in her family was broken up by mistakes, apologies, weeping, or (more commonly as the years went by) retreats to quiet seclusion in her bedroom with her movies–is no surprise.

At one point our father became a passionate fan of Taylor Hartman’s thoroughly unscientific “Color Code” personality assessment; he and Kathleen took the test, and all the older children did as well. Dad was, unsurprisingly, a strong Red: assertive, inventive, a born leader. I asked Mom what the test revealed her to be. I was expecting that she’d be a Blue, the empathetic, maternal care-giver. I was surprised–though as the years went by I no longer was–by her answer: White. “Peace,” she said to me on the phone. “I just want peace; I just want quiet; I just want everyone to get along and leave each other alone.” That’s something I don’t think I could have seen in my mother when I first read the lines above from the Commedia as a teen-ager, but it haunts me now. 

 **** 

Whether my father was made by the cultural and doctrine of Mormonism, or just found it a perfect fit for the person he was, is an unanswerable question. What is undeniable is that the milieu Dad created for himself, imagined for himself, worked and prayed and served for in connection with himself, was Mormon to the core. He was LDS American busy-ness personified: always setting goals, making plans, accepting callings, starting projects, borrowing money, giving counsel, shifting funds, giving lessons, bringing lawsuits, preaching sermons, being sued, opening accounts, leading prayers, arranging vacations, making deals, and more; the idea of our father fully at rest is almost inconceivable. The words of Joseph Smith presented as a revelation in Doctrine & Covenants 130:2–“that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there,” presumably referring to the activity which will exist in the heavenly afterlife–has long since become a part of Mormon folklore, and it is a way of understanding eternal activity, engagement, and progress that fits our experience of Dad perfectly.

Personally, I find that promise of Smith’s an existential horror, and thankfully impossible to imagine actually being true. The “sociality” of human existence, the phenomenology of our daily-ness, is wholly defined by the banalities of our fallen, broken character, and our embodied limitations: unexpected delays, embarrassing remarks, mislaid plans, accidental lies, frustrated schedules, false presuppositions, misunderstood comments, unforced errors, harmful distractions, mistaken identities, rude fantasies, failed witticisms, and the thousand other mix-ups and indiscretions that give rise to the hidden confusion, quiet annoyance, unarticulated resentments, and general consternation that everyone experiences. Not everyone experiences them in the same way, of course: some they drive to distraction, or even despair, while others find ways to manage them, transcend them, or just keep themselves so busy they barely know they are there. But the way they wear us down is, I think, inextricable from being human.

To imagine a world where the Savior’s grace burns away all our enervating imperfections and quotidian foolishness would have to involve, I believe, imagining a world without business hierarchies, social obligations, scheduled meetings, family relations, civic arrangements, first impressions, and all the rest; whatever kind of “sociality” it would have, it certainly couldn’t be anything like what the work and weariness of the mortal world has prepared us for. Some of those who fully embrace the folkloric (and I think maddening) implications of D&C 130:2 come around, in my observation, to implicitly agreeing with the above sentence, and therefore choose to deny the burning promise of salvific transformation entirely. God’s power, to their mind, becomes merely the power of a smart mechanic, a talented artisan, a genial human resource operator: heaven is just a continuation of what we already have on earth, and the eternities are nothing but management, only management, all the way down (or rather, up). To the skilled who have spent their lives joyfully cracking their knuckles and matching their wits and waking up early and leaning in and trying again in the midst of the ever-busy, never-ending machine that is the universe God created, this might not appear problematically unChristian (though I think it actually very much is). But regardless, maybe, just maybe, if one can untangle oneself from Mormon folklore, one might be able to imagine the eternities instead as being a place without the temporality of interaction at all. Maybe it could be a place of being seen, and loved, fully and finally and eternally, with no further obligations entailed and no continuing actions required. Maybe it could be like a beautiful rose, an endless celestial circle of petals full of light. Maybe, just maybe, it could be a place of rest, of peace.

**** 

I’m sure all these memories have been intensified and shaped by Mom’s struggles during the years which followed our father’s entirely unexpected and profoundly distressing death on September 19, 2016. The distress was not because of Dad’s suffering; his death was instantaneous, a random stroke while golfing alone early one morning. (He would routinely wake up very early and head to the golf course to play 18 holes by himself, because partners would slow him down.) The assumption which everyone, including Mom herself, had long held was that Dad would long outlive his wife, and that he would be able to care for her and protect her privacy until her end. With the terrible loss of her husband of 51 years, Mom’s life was upended. In the years that followed, she sometimes enjoyed long stretches of stability and peace on her own at Foxhill, the family home on tall hill overlooking Otis Orchards, WA, which my father had built for the whole family nearly two decades before. But eventually, her ability to take care of herself greatly declined, and her dependence–costly in terms of time, and increasingly complicated in terms of the emotions involved–upon my brother Jesse and my older sister Samatha, the two siblings who still lived in the Spokane area, became unsustainable. Up until the very day we moved our mother into a full-time care facility, she wanted to stay at Foxhill. The changes she faced then were deeply painful, because they meant a change of space, a change of routine, a change in the patterns that she’d fallen into–and Mom, I came to understand only as an adult, had spent her whole life building, for those she loved as well as herself, patterns and expectations that could be relied upon. I can only imagine how difficult their disruption could be.

On my proselyting church mission, I ended up serving for nearly a full year in a South Korean city named Suwon. Mom and Dad came to pick me up at the end of my mission, and we toured around South Korea. On our last night of visiting Suwon, after a church meeting where I was able to introduce my parents to people I had long known and say some goodbyes, I was frustrated, feeling antsy and unsure and unfulfilled. So I sneaked out of our hotel room, and I spent one last night in Suwon, wandering the city. I came back to the hotel believing I’d had the experience I was looking for–and I discovered my parents awake. I can’t remember anything specific about that 3am encounter, except one line as we settled back to sleep: my mother begging me, “Please stay.” It took me years to begin to recognize how confused, frustrated, or terrified my mother must have felt that night, in a country where neither she nor her husband could speak the language, in a hotel room where their connection to the culture around them had left in the middle of the night without a word–and especially since, knowing my father, aware that there was nothing he could do, had probably promptly fallen back asleep after I sneaked out, while Mom waited all through the hours while I was gone.

Perhaps, in the end, our mother was tired of waiting–waiting for her body to finally shut down, waiting for her to be reunited with Jim. She would talk about wanting to die and be with her husband once more casually with her children and grandchildren; while sometimes her time at Guardian Angel Homes enabled her to make new connections and take up new practices, more usually she would fall into ever more sad and slow routines, staying alone in her room, watching movies, separating herself from church, finding even close associations with her children sometimes hurtful and depressing, as her expectations shrunk further and further. Eighty years, after all, is a very long time to live. Perhaps she’d lived enough.

When her health seemed to require yet another trip to the hospital, yet another surgery, yet another set of burdens (this one would have been a colostomy bag, a continued increase in the likelihood of further infections, and likely even more pain), we all could understand her decision. The very last words that I spoke to her that I know she heard, on a Tuesday evening phone call, the day before the end was made clear, were words of trust: “You know your body and spirit better than anyone, Mom–we’ll support whatever you do.” She replied “Thank you,” and kissed me through the phone connection. There she was, thanking me and showing loving appreciation, as though it was me who needed to give her permission to make the most personal decision imaginable–a decision to finally, at last, not focus on the future, not accommodate other people’s plans, not make arrangements and adjustments but to accept the end that would come, and look forward to it gratefully. I doubt she felt these preoccupations that haunt me now, but that doesn’t make them, as I weigh them in my heart, any less true.

**** 

Kathleen Jolley Fox died on Friday, November 14, at 1pm, less than two days after entering the hospital for the final time. By early in the afternoon her breathing had slowed even further, and he face was turning pale. The family decided it was time, and all seven of her sons–all of us Melchizedek priesthood holders as the Mormon faith understands such things–laid our hands upon her body to pray, with my oldest brother, Daniel, giving voice to our desire that she be released from this life. And her waiting ended. I hope, immediately thereafter, she found herself in God’s glorious presence, a petal enveloped in love and light and a timelessness free from any kind of wearying work and waiting. And, since we really can’t know what the afterlife is truly like, I hope there is, somehow, nonetheless some element of Mormon folklore present there as well, so that my father can, as he always did, find joy in making himself weary with organizing, serving, planning, doing. And finally I hope, in that eternity, that when he takes an occasional rest from his work, he can be like a bee landing on a flower petal–because Mom, at rest, would likely rather simply abide attentively in the presence of her eternal partner more than anything else.

 

The 10 Best Books I Read in 2025

Phil Christman, Why Christians Should be Leftists

A wonderful, short--and yes, somewhat rambling, but only in the way the best kind of earnest testimonies ramble--affirmation of the undisputable truth (or at least so I think) that Christianity, at its core, is a universal, egalitarian, socialist--that is, a leftist--message. It's not so much an argument (though there are good arguments within it) as an altar call, but that altar it calls its readers to is one I fully embrace. More here, if you're so inclined.

Tobias Cremer, The Godless Crusade

There are a lot of books that have been written over the past decade trying to make sense of the rise of right-wing populism as a genuinely powerful electoral reality in Europe and America (and elsewhere, though this book only refers to polities outside of North America and Western Europe very briefly); this is the best one I've read yet. A serious work of scholarship, based on both survey data and sociological analysis, Cremer doesn't so much break new ground as provide a clarifying language to understand the world of Brexit, Donald Trump, and the rest. His detailed case for seeing the heart of this movement, across national borders, as an ersatz religion, a political religious identity without any spiritual substance, is undeniable, I think.

David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

I listened to this book with Melissa during a long drive, and I was absolutely capitvated; this was one case where the audio experience of hearing read aloud a thrilling historical tale of shipwrecks, mutiny, and survival--and all the personalities and conflicts which came before it, and all the political fallout that came afterwards--was a perfect match.

Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

I'm a sucker of everything (or nearly everything, I guess) Beatles related, and this book was no exception. This is a delightful and insightful addition to the Beatles canon, a look at the John and Paul relationship and songwriting partnership organized around and viewed through their songs--an approach which is sometimes a little forced, but more often than not kind of revelatory. As I explained here, this book forced me to do what I should have one years ago: really give John's musical ouevre a thorough listen, which took up much of my year. I'm glad I did it.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman

This one was another audio listen during another long drive, but this time the script was acted out as a radio play, and it was delightful. I'd read parts of this comic collection before, but after listening to it all, I had to track it down and give it a read myself, all in one sitting. This all happened during the summer, as part of a family gathering in Wisconsin, before we all went to see the new Superman movie--and considering the 2025's Superman not only ended up being one of my favorite movies of the year, but also inspired some serious commentary on my part, the presentation of the character in All-Star Superman (widely regarded as one of the best ever, as well as an inspiration for the movie) stands in my mind as one of my favorite narrative experiences of the year.

Jonathan Rauch, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy

Rauch's book wasn't one of my favorite reads this year, but it was a book that made me think, and then rethink, my own understanding of the place my own faith community has within the history, the politics, and the ideas which characterize the American society that Rauch and I both value (however differently). My thoughts about the book are somewhat critical, but I also have to give it some respect: it's argument about the contributions with Mormonism can made to American pluralism and democracy are definitely reductive, and in some ways wrong, but are valuable and challenging as well, all the same.

Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry

Why this book? I'm not really sure--the whole Murderbot series,which my wife has been raving about for a couple of years now, is a tremendous delight; I had not greater pure reading joy this year than the weeks during which I tore through all six of these books. Wells has created a host of awesome science-fiction characters with great, funny, and even sometimes deeply engaging backgrounds and narrative voices; following their adventures is an absolute hoot, and occasionally even moving as well. I suppose I chose this one because it is the most recently published, and also because it is a superb, self-contained story: Murderbot investigating a murder, using his brains and his slightly lessening misanthropy to solve the case. Great stuff.

Norman Wirzba, The Paradise of God and Agrarian Spirit

Wirzba is an author that I've been familiar with for a while; his essays on Christianity, ecology, and sustainability have often informed my thinking and teaching over the years. But this year I taught, for the first time, a religion course at Friends University, and the topic was "Christian Resources for the Care of Creation"--and these two books by Wirzba became essential contributors to my lectures and discussion topics for the class. Paradise of God is better if you're looking for an explicitly environmentalist interpretation of key Biblical texts, particularly the Book of Genesis; but Agrarian Spirit is better if you're looking for something more pastoral, more political, and less grounded in Biblical theology. Both are wonderful, essential books for helping people to construct a Christian environmental ethic.

Daniel Wortel-London, The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981

This is not a work of political theory; it's a history of urban development, of finance capitalism and its critics over nearly 150 years of New York City's growth and transformation. And yet, in covering this ideas and arguments, Wortel-London has written the best work of urban and political reflection that I've read in a long time. See more here, if you're interested (and yes, you absolutely should be!).

Recognizing Christianity’s Universal Leftism for What it Undisputedly Is

[Cross-posted to Religious Socialism]

Phil Christman, a writer and lecturer at the University of Michigan, is a committed Protestant Christian. He grew up attending a fundamentalist Calvinist church, and sharing in that perspective, but it was one that he struggled with from very early on. His disentangling from that approach to Christianity didn’t lead him to renounce his faith; rather, his faith evolved, and with that spiritual evolution came a political one as well. In the excellent Why Christians Should Be Leftists, he testifies to that evolution, and calls other Christians to join him as well.

The fact that Christman’s argument really isn’t one, but rather is a testimony and an altar call of sorts, must be kept in mind when assessing the book. The way he talks about “leftism”—which he refuses to capitalize, stating in an early footnote that he thinks the term describes an “overall direction” and not a destination “where a person can definitively arrive” (p. 16)—is one that flows organically from his Christian commitments. Rather than starting out by defining terms and unfolding a discourse premised on the materialist language that so much of post-Marxist leftism has been defined by over the past two centuries, his reflections are rooted in a grab-bag of deeply religious, even Biblical, concepts and concern that every believing Christian, in one way or another, confronts. What is fallen in this world? What is the nature of work? Should those who accept Jesus as their savior have a politics? Should they have kings? Should believers love their enemies? And just who, exactly, are their neighbors, and how should they interact with them? In Christman’s view, a serious engagement with all these questions and more must inevitably point believers towards some kind of socialism—but this is a conclusion which he articulates in a manner that, while deeply informed by political argument, actually doesn’t flow from the arguments which have shaped socialism over the years.

This, I think, is why a socialist review of Christman’s book may be valuable. Why Christians Should Be Leftists hasn’t become a bestselling, culture-defining book in the months since its publication (unfortunately), but it has been fairly widely reviewed…overwhelmingly by other thoughtful writers—peers of Christman’s, really—who share his Christian commitments. Kayak Oakes praised it in National Catholic Reporter, as did James K.A. Smith in The Christian Century and Samuel McCann in The Presbyterian Outlook (the more conservative publications First Things, Christianity Today, and Front Porch Republic were, perhaps predictably. less receptive to his book, though all acknowledged the power of his anti-capitalist claims). All of the above comments are worth perusing (as are thoughtful engagements with Christman by such writers as Alan Jacobs), and so are Christman’s own occasional responses to such. But none of any of the above, to my knowledge, have approached the book from the perspective of the Left (using a capital letter this time) as it has emerged over the course of the rise of global capitalism, the impacts of the industrial revolution, and the both important achievements and catastrophic failures attached to the Left throughout Western modernity. I’m hardly an expert on all of the above, but as a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as believing Christian (though a Mormon one, which I suspect at least a couple of the above might insist may not really count), let me give it a try.

Christman’s turn towards leftism, and his turn away from the conservative Christianity that defined his early life, defines the whole arc of his book, and is noted by every reviewer of it. As a college student attending a Calvinist university, he recounts being a lonely, confused, frustrated individual—feeling like a profound loser, in his own terms. And then recounts a time when he was reading from the Bible as part of group of similar losers outdoors—at least as compared to the other students playing the guitar, smoking, or flirting in their own groups all around them—and as they worked through Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament, he suddenly thought about everyone around him differently:

I suddenly saw the glory of God shining out of their faces….[E]ach of these people was a subject that a person could love, and was capable of giving love to others, and was therefore infinitely precious and infinitely interesting. That whole economy of losers and winners, with its implied scarcity of worthiness, had disappeared. Or not disappeared but receded: it didn’t seem inevitable or fully real anymore. It seemed like a lie that needed to be undone by the constant practice of universal, constant, and unvarying love

From this point on, step by step, the idea that the Christian message of God’s grace, forgiveness, and love entails an absolute, universal equality of persons comes to be unfolded in Christman’s life and thought. “Part of the point of being a Christian,” he writes, “is that you’re supposed to unlearn the human instinct to circle the wagons, identify the outsiders, prioritize the in-group,” and instead develop “the deep conviction that every stranger, every enemy, is a neighbor” (pp. 30-31). Since the structure of capitalism depends upon the private or corporate accumulation of profit and property—and thus functionally meaning the exclusion of others from possession of such of wealth—that means Christians have to move beyond it, even the more liberal and egalitarian versions of it. Similarly, since the structure of national borders depends upon the territorial claims to sovereignty—and thus functionally meaning the exclusion of others from the systems of law and care that sovereign governments establish—that means that Christians have to move beyond the state's imposition of them, even when done so in light of comparatively democratic and humanitarian priorities. The universalizing, the absolute neighboring, of the resources of the world and the people who live within it, is the socialism that Christman believes the plain teachings of Jesus require. (And for those who insist that such "socialism" needs to take the form of personal charity rather than government policy, Christman's succinct reproofs--so why haven't believing Christians ever actually created charitable systems sufficient to meet Jesus's call? and why wouldn't such charity create the same "dependency" which conservatives supposedly fear?--are as solid as any I've ever read.)

Obviously, Karl Marx would have all sorts of problems with this. Not the final result--Marx's vision of post-socialist revolution communism included the "withering away of the state" and, thus, presumably the realization of some kind of universal community of freedom and recognition, after all. Rather, Marx's contempt would have been for Christman's locating of the roots of this ideal in moral conviction, rather than some kind of material logic. His famous description of Christian socialism--“the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat”--makes his perspective fairly clear: if socialism is understood as something that emerges from the guilty feelings or inspired insights of religious believers, rather than something that is built historically, structurally—that is, scientifically—then it'll never truly be a liberating and empowering social form: it'll just be another con that the upper classes impose upon everyone else (and perhaps actually delude themselves into believing). Marx's perspective is certainly at least partly responsible for the hostility to religion widely associated with the Left over the centuries.

But as anyone who spends any time amongst actual Leftists can tell you, this is a perspective that 1) was obviously wrong from the beginning, and has remained so over the years, and 2) has been basically ignored by tens of millions of Leftist religious believers over the same period of time, Christians most certainly included. In regards to point 1), the vital revolutionary force which Marx’s analysis of the history of capitalism provided, whatever its usefulness and insight insofar as understanding the alienation experienced under industrialization is concerned, has been questioned, denounced, re-interpreted, and re-affirmed in alternative ways that have given shape to every socialist argument since the mid-19^th century on. To resolutely demand fidelity to Marx's presumed linkage between the opposition to capitalism and the opposition to religious faith in the face of all this thoughtful debate is to do as much damage to the heritage of that ideal as is done by non-Leftists who insist that “socialism” can only ever mean the tyranny of Stalin or Mao. And in regards to point 2), the fact that Christian socialists—the Methodists who helped form the British Labor Party, the Catholics who organized the Catholic Worker Movement, and hundreds of other example—have, sometimes out of necessity and sometimes out of genuine intellectual agreement, appropriated and articulated their views in manners borrowed from Marx (talking about “class struggle,” for example), hardly means that their socialism is therefore Marxist, and necessarily carries all of his materialist, historicist, anti-religious baggage. This is especially the case for believers in the words of Jesus as presented in the New Testament, since of course those words were inspiring believers to—as recounted in the Book of Acts, chapter 4—sell their goods, distribute them equally, and have all things in common, right from the beginning. When it comes to socialism, Marx was a late addition to the tradition, and as important (for both good and ill) his contributions were, the Left has no more need to be beholden to him than it does to be beholden to Leo Tolstoy, Eduard Bernstein, Eugene Debs, Keir Hardie, Beatrice Webb, Dorothy Day, Simone Weil, or Gustavo Díaz.

Christman, for his part, elides most of this history by providing an assessment of where he sees different leftist intellectual trajectories pointing that is, in his view, “pretty vibes-based,” treating Marx’s thought “as we’d treat a buffet: you pick the stuff you think is helpful and ignore the rest, the same as you would any other economist or political theorist” (pp. 144-145). For people whose approach to these matters is grounded in historical and theoretical arguments over ideology and the writings of particular individuals, this is a pretty frustrating approach. Partly because it gets stuff wrong—as Christman does, such as when, earlier in the book, he goes too far in condemning the liberalism of John Locke as incapable of responding to the threats of capitalism, forgetting that Locke himself wrote that the rights of the property-owner oblige them to make sure that “enough, and as good” will always be available to everyone else—and partly because these are, by necessity, political debates that we are having, and as such being guided by one’s revelatory experience with the Sermon on the Mount leaves much unsaid.

But that doesn’t mean, and shouldn’t mean, that defenses of socialism like Christman’s need to be considered wrong; they aren’t. They just aren’t complete—as I think Christman himself would be quick to acknowledge. Again, his book isn’t really an argument for why Christians should be on the Left; it is a testimony of why, and how, the Christian message made it clear to him how he should think about inequality, about capitalism, about war, about borders, about wealth, and thus found himself moving leftward, hand-in-hand with his faith. He very thoughtfully considers all sorts of Left arrangements which the socialist tradition has inspired reformers and revolutionaries alike to consider over the centuries—worker co-ops, redistribution via taxation, government ownership of industries, wealth funds, and more—and acknowledges that there is plenty of thinking and working yet to be done in pursuing these Christian ends (“I don’t think it pays to get too dug in at this point on any of those systems,” he comments ruefully—p. 121). But that just means that Christman, like any other religious believer whose eyes have been opened to the socialist imperative, is in the same condition as the rest of us: making our way towards more justice, more fairness, more beloved communities in our world, and being attended by God's grace and forgiveness in the midst of our own unavoidable involvement in all that challenges those aspirations along the way.

It should be noted that many of the Christian reviewers of Why Christians Should Be Leftists do, in fact, recognize that any proper understand of Christianity imposes a universalist vision of neighborliness and love upon believers, and they consequently recognize that there is truth to Christian condemnations of how even liberal democratic states (and their richest citizens and corporations) police their borders and protect their wealth, even if they demure from recognizing that such condemnations put them on the Left. But what about personal sin, they ask? What about moral purity? The records we have of Jesus’s words suggest that he didn’t talk about sexual morality nearly as much as he talked about sharing your goods with your neighbor, and didn’t condemn personal lifestyles nearly as much as he condemned exploiting the poor—but to insist that he never talked about the former isn’t correct either. So yes, those who want to find reasons to doubt the sincerity of Christman’s Christian faith solely on the basis of what he thinks about abortion or homosexuality or any other culture war issue can certainly do so. And when I put on my political scientist hat, I can explain at length how predictable it is that Christman, as he moved away from the Calvinist socialization of his youth, likely came to follow well-established patterns of liberal thought which granted enough importance to individualist expressions of moral choice such that he simply couldn’t take the sexual traditionalism of much of American Christianity seriously. But frankly, as something of a left conservative myself, I am happy that Christman felt no need to warp his testimony so as to encompass and defend those elements of his current political beliefs that actually have nothing to do what’s going on at their heart.

Their heart is, simply, a pious conviction that political, much less pragmatic, disputes about what can or should be done when it comes to applying the Sermon on the Mount, to applying a complete abandonment of any kind of distinction between winners and losers, are secondary. Towards the end of the book, Christman writes (in a vein very reminiscent of the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, though he never mentions his name):

The machinery of history is not ours to operate even if we could, which we can’t. But that’s OK, because there isn’t any machinery anyway. There’s the kingdom of God, which God is bringing about and will bring about. We live in a way that anticipates it. We forgive debtors, we hasten to resolve conflicts, we try to love our enemies. We try to build a society where the meek, the peacemaker, the person on the bottom of things is abundantly blessed. Leftism at its best helps us to do that. We are leftists only insofar as it is a name for our doing that (pp. 153-154).

Christman’s final words of testimony are, appropriately, “Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus” (p. 174). Both the unreconstructed Marxist, and the MAGA-influenced Christian conservative who refuses to accept Jesus’s call for those who follow him to have complete solidarity with the poor, with their enemies, and with everyone else, would likely sniff at such a conclusion. But this Christian socialist loved it, and the book itself as well. To Mr. Christman, I can only say, as our mutually acknowledged lord and savior is reported to have said, "Well done, good and faithful servant." (And to everyone else, myself included, I can only also add: “Go and do likewise.”)

The 10 Best Movies I Saw in 2025

As always, this is my listing of what I think were the best movies I saw in the past calendar year, not necessarily movies that came out during that year.

The Apartment was one of the films Melissa and I saw this year through the Wichita Orpheum's 2025 Anniversary Film Series, a monthly event that we've fallen in love with (and we can't wait for the 2026 series to begin; it's going to be great!). As for the movie itself, what can I say? This 65-year-old film is as funny, as sharp, as observant, as dark, as real a romantic fantasy of adult sex and love and longing as any romantic comedy I can think of. Given its whole mise-en-scène--New York City corporate office culture in the late 1950s--I can't imagine a better way of telling its story, or a better cast to do so. Billy Wilder knocked it out of the park.

Sometimes you want to see a movie that is a stagey one-hander, just a straight-up bit of focused, funny, sad, outrageous story-telling, presented in an enclosed environment within a defined period of time: a play, in other words. Blue Moon is all that; a movie about plays and musicals, about the words that can make performances on the stage truly play and sing, and about one of the greatest writers of such words ever. Ethan Hawke's Lorenz Hart is an amazing character, and carries the whole film.

Dog Day Afternoon is 50 years old this year (yes, another Wichita Orpheum anniversary film viewing), and I wouldn't change a thing about it. Yes, if we wanted to recreate today the story of this ridiculous, tragic, farcical attempted bank robbery from the summer of 1972, the racial, sexual, ethnic, and LGBTQ aspects of the story would be approached very differently. But would doing so had made the film more of a document of its time and place: urban America in the 1970s, as the social democratic aspirations of the New Deal are clearly collapsing under the weight of bureaucracy and diversity, but the homogenizing effects of finance and global capitalism and technology had not yet fully taken root? I don't think so.

Flow was the most beautiful thing I saw on screen this year, hands down. A wordless, apocalyptic fantasy that gives us, through ordinary animals struggling to survive, something fabulously human: heroism, suffering, possessiveness, guilt, suspicion, nobility, and more. A tremendous accomplishment in visual communication, and the sort of thing that shows what animated story-telling really can--and should--be.

As I have argued many, many times over the years on this blog, President James Earl Carter, Jr., was one of a kind. While neither a transformative genius nor someone particularly good at holding onto and wielding the power inherent in being a President of the United States, he was, nonetheless, something of a miracle: a genuinely good man who managed to climb to the top of the greasy pole of artifice, image, and money that is American politics. There is much which explains his ability to get to such a point and still be capable of articulating, in an embarrassingly sincere language, what he understood about peace, decency, fairness, and work--but one part of the explanation has to be that Jimmy Carter, probably unlike almost every other modern occupant of the White House, actually listened to the radio, and could relate, as ordinary radio-listeners do, to what he heard. He loved the radio, and the folk, pop, country, blues, jazz, and rock-n-roll stars he loved returned this appreciation. Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President isn't a deeply critical work, but it tells an essential story: a story about a man who came along at a time when America's cultural exhaustion hadn't yet been commodified, and who enabled artists as diverse as Gregg Allman, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson, Dizzy Gillespie, Bob Dylan, and more to feel something new about their country. And that's just beautiful.

Judas and the Black Messiah is a terrific, depressing story, told in ways that sometimes veer into biopic conventionality, but that other times becomes janglingly real. The creepy scenes with Martin Sheen's J. Edgar Hoover, oozing a frightening racist pretension, and the powerful scenes between Daniel Kaluuya's Fred Hampton and Dominic Fishback's Deborah Johnson, negotiating their relationship as violence and fate weigh them down--all of them, and more, are absolutely brilliant, so much so that sometimes LaKeith Stanfield's William O'Neal, the "Judas" of the title, is overshadowed. But that lack of balance doesn't stop it from being an utterly compelling drama.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is delightfully cast, beautifully shot, full of sequences that charmed (Sharon Tate watching herself on the screen in the movie theater) and deeply unnerved (Cliff Booth exploring the cult-occupied Spahn Ranch) and completely satisfied (Rick Dalton improvising and pulling off a great scene as a bad guy in a cheap television Western pilot). For all that, I realized about halfway through that it was something I'm not sure I'd seen before--an actually small Tarantino movie, a Tarantino story that wasn't sprawling out of control with themes and subplots and hints and pretensions. I need to re-watch Jackie Brown, which I've told everyone for years was my favorite Tarantino movie, and it was--but maybe its contained narrative was matched, or even improved upon, by this one? Anyway, a great, fun, even kind of humble fantasy of a cinematic story.

I wasn't a particularly big fan of Pee-Wee Herman; Paul Reubens's comic creation was absolutely capable of tickling my funny bone (I remember watching his 1985 appearance as host on Saturday Night Live, something touched upon briefly--and somewhat bitterly--in this documentary, and laughing my ass off as he minced through the studio audience, re-naming everyone in such a weird manner), but his shtick just wasn't my own. Still, it was a great shtick, and worth honoring. Pee-Wee As Himself does that incisively. Paul Reubens was always trying to exercise control over his image, and variations on the theme of control--his intense friendships and resentments with other actors and artists in his circle, his devotion to his mostly hidden nature retreat in the Hollywood Hills, his willingness to exit and then return to the closet as a gay man as his career demanded, and most of all the incredible work and detail that went into shaping his artistic vehicles--define the whole movie. Overall, a delightful document of the comedy, punk, and avant-garde art scenes in LA in the 1970s and 80s, and one of the most distinctive members they ever produced.

Sing Sing is a heartfelt, thoughtful, honest, and delightfully--meaning painfully--realized story. At first I thought that perhaps I was watching some kind of tone poem, a film about something desperately sad that people live through and find moments of joy and triumph in nonetheless, like the early films of David Gordon Green. But developments later in the film made it more conventional, though no less affecting for all that. A wonderful, tear-jerking--but organically realized--celebration of art and humanity.

This comic-book Gen X geek has no notes, folks; Superman is straight-up one of the best super-hero movies I've ever seen. James Gunn's DC cinematic universe is, on the basis of this one film, going to dispense with many of the science-fiction and espionage thriller tropes that shaped, so successfully, Marvel movies for more than a decade, and in the place of a lot of that earnest attention to the dramatic, simply stipulating that aliens and meta-humans and super-heroes and everything else is part of the fabric of the world, and has been for centuries. This is not the comic book sensibility made real; this is reality made comic booky, and it delights me. Nearly 50 years ago--back when the character of Superman was barely 40 years old, as oppose to nearly a century now--writers, performers, and filmmakers cinematically realized this hero in a way that drew upon a sense of continuity from throughout the twentieth century; this Superman is part of a 21st-century reinvention, and so long as Gunn keeps his passionate, moralistic, geekily funny version of Clark Kent at the center of his movie universe, I will absolutely be along for the ride.

Becky Elder, a Local Kansas Matriarch (and More)

Last week, on a clear and cold Friday afternoon, I joined a couple of hundred other people to attend, and pay our respects during, the graveside service of Rebecca Love “Becky” Elder, at Elderslie Farm, her family’s property in Kechi. She was a powerful and beloved Kansas matriarch, in the tradition of many others throughout the history of our state. She was also an inspiration and a friend, one that I will deeply miss.

I can’t remember when I first met Becky; it was likely a few years after my family moved to Wichita and I began teaching at Friends University in 2006. I know I was definitely aware of her by 2011; by that I time I had, after a slow start, begun to involve myself in local associations and arguments—I think my presentation on populism at the Wichita Pachyderm Club might have been one that really caught Becky’s eye—and as I became more familiar with different people, projects, and programs throughout Sedgwick County, I discovered that she and her family members were a thread which could connect almost all of them. People that knew Becky well could run down the same list of local endeavors she had her fingerprints on which my memory is calling up, and no doubt add many more to it: the Eighth Day Institute, the New Symposium, SunnyDale Community Library, the Friends University Neighborhood Garden (the only one of all these where my involvement actually preceded hers), Jubilee Presbyterian Church, and most importantly, Northfield School for the Liberal Arts.

The closest and broadest associations Becky had, at least from my observations outside the immediate Elder family and their church communities, were those that sprung, one way or another, from Northfield. Becky’s long crusade on behalf of home schooling, independent schooling, classical schools, micro-schools, and a half-dozen other overlapping alternative educational visions was central to her public identity. Becky's visionary aspirations perhaps put her more in the position of being an entrepreneur of teaching rather than a full-timer teacher herself, but as someone who has made the latter his career, my admiration for her skill with students is boundless. She was one of the purest believers in the ability of people to embrace the history, tradition, language, and culture they have inherited, simultaneously critique it, and through doing so make it part of their own civic and spiritual formation—the classical notion of humanitas--that I have ever known. While I never heard her quote it—and she quoted lots of authors, be they philosophers, theologians, economists, sociologists or more, to say nothing of dozens of figures from the literary canon—I cannot think of anyone I have known through all my decades in the classroom who more deeply embraced, as both a pedagogy and a telos, Goethe’s great celebration of self-discovery, and thereby self-revelation, from Faust:

 

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,

Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last;

Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen.

 

(What from your fathers you received as heir,

Acquire anew, if you would possess it.

What is not used is but a load to bear;

But if today creates it, we can use and bless it.)

 

My wife and I were products of the public schools, meaning our education was not one informed by such classical assumptions and discipline. That doesn’t mean we were ignorant of the limitations of the public schooling model, with its centralized and standardized curricula and bureaucratic disciplinary regimes; my mother turned to home schooling my younger siblings soon after I left home, and that legacy has shaped the education of most of my nieces and nephews. Still, Melissa and I never considered any approach besides the public one for our own children, perhaps in part because we always felt relatively successful in working with the schools our daughters attended, finding ways to preserve the localist and familial elements that are always present in any actually neighborhood school, or at least so we both believed. (The fact that, once we settled here in Wichita, we bought a home where our children could easily walk or bike to their elementary, middle, and high schools was certainly a part of this.)

As I wrote over 20 years ago, at a time when our four children were still in the midst of their public schooling journeys, “I like the idea of the state being a partial agent of education.” Why? Because the liberal democratic order—whatever its many flaws as manifested in the United States—can and, I think, usually does add an egalitarian element to one’s education, and by so doing complement and enrich the traditions one receives from home and community. Too often the personal development which an embrace of one’s individual inheritance makes possible is warped by our globalized capitalist world into just one more instantiation of meritocracy; structurally weaving the imperatives of liberal egalitarianism into the mass public educational ideal can preserve something truly civic, at least as much as the classic ideal may.

All this, of course, meant that Becky and I had some very deep disagreements when it came to schooling. And yet those disagreements never got in the way of us conversing—always curiously and joyfully—about the potential for neighborhoods to reflect, and provide foundations for, the plurality of ways in which people can learn and grow, and thereby sustain one another, their communities, and their natural environments. She embraced and was always looking to share with her students and me and anyone else who would listen those authors and intellectual models who tied their stories to the socio-economic and environmental conditions that made real localism possible. She was instinctively sympathetic to deeply Kansan anti-government, anti-union attitudes she had inherited from her family, but she took up those arguments in a populist, even radical way. In that way, her Old Right libertarianism and my anarcho-socialism met on common ground. The first time I was invited to speak at Northfield (back when the school met in the old Love Box warehouse on 37^th St. in north Wichita), I walked into the makeshift classroom, saw quotations from McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers all around the walls, and assumed I was entering a traditionally conservative environment; but after a day of presentations and discussions with students of all ages, conversations which had ranged from town meetings to backyard gardens to the interstate highway system to oil monopolies to climate change to do-it-yourself-tractor repair, I saw the truth: Becky Elder was a hippie. God bless her for it.

The hippies get a bad rap, to be sure, and much of it is deserved; so much of the counter-culture a half-century or more ago turned its back upon tradition entirely, and assumed that a new civilization could be simply willed into existence, through communes and co-ops, from the ground up. And too many of the wrong lessons of that counter-cultural vision continue to inform the transhuman delusions of the Silicon Valley elite, whose understanding of the DIY mentality focuses more on venture capital and AI technology than practical crafts and community sharing. But the best aspects of hippie-dom, especially when conjoined with the kind of deep Christian faith and agrarian practice that Becky’s whole existence reflected, are profoundly wise. It is a good thing to insist on developing real local knowledge, on breaking away from larger systems and getting down on one’s knees instead, whether to weed a garden or pray to God or read a text closely (or ideally, all three). While the political culture of Kansas may on the surface may seem to be anything but friendly to this kind of deep, loving, local engagement, I think that Becky’s example of rooted, trusting, make-it-up-as-you-go-along activism actually only adds to our state’s long tradition of local matriarchs making the most of the soil and situation around them, and making history as they do so.

I’m thinking here of Mary Skubitz, a Slovenian immigrant to Kansas who was brought to the coal mining country of Crawford County by her parents as a child in 1890. Decades later, she helped organize other wives and mothers into the “Amazon Army” of 1921, a mass protest of women, marching from mine to mine, facing armed threats from the owners, demanding improvements of the terrible conditions their husbands and sons suffered in the mines. Or I’m thinking of Minnie Wish-Ken-O, a Potawatomie woman in Jackson County who took up the leadership in her tribe during the 1930s, in the midst of the dissolution and despair brought on by drought and the Dust Bowl, and from her farm led the fight against the national government’s efforts at tribal re-organization and termination over the subsequent two decades.

Even more humbly, my colleague Ken Spurgeon has resurrected—through his film Sod and Stubble—the story of Rosa Hagg Ise, a new bride who settled with her husband Henry and raised a family in Osborne County in the 1870s. The frontier challenges she overcame made her a determined believer in education, and her children in turn graduated from some of the most prestigious schools in America (as well as telling their mother’s story in what became an early Kansas classic). Unsurprisingly, education is a constant in so many of these stories—which just brings us around to Becky again. Her great-grandmother, Eldora Dugan Love, settled with her husband Charles in Butler County in the 1870s; from her homestead, Eldora published a women’s journal which made educational and religious improvement its central message. And three generations later, that message continues on.

Towards the conclusion of Becky’s graveside service, the pastor invoked Becky’s commitment to “place,” both in terms of landed particularity (the family had made arrangements beforehand, in accordance with Kansas state law, to bury Becky without embalmment on her own property, which they did), and in terms of an attitude towards our part of God’s plan—loving where we are planted, and looking forward to that heavenly place of love and grace where we can reside after our earthly sojourns end. As I watched her body lowered by her sons into the grave, I could help but think of my own mother’s recent passing, and also think of how this great matriarch of the Elder clan was still teaching. By example, she was showing us how one puts down roots, and becomes part of an ever-growing, ever-revealing bounteous creation. She lived a Kansas life, and a Christian life, and a life that found and shared freedom and opportunity and insight in fertile minds and fertile ground. What could be more graceful, and more local, than that?

 

 

 

Listening to Lennon #8: Milk and Honey (Plus, a Summary)

John Lennon was murdered 45 years ago this evening, on December 8, 1980. The photo attached was taken that afternoon--ghoulishly, but entirely coincidentally, it includes the face of Mark Chapman, his assassin, who had been hanging around outside the apartment John and Yoko had lived in for the past five years, along with all the journalists and photographers who dogged Lennon constantly, hoping to get an autograph. Lennon obliged. (I've clipped Chapman out of the photo.)

Lennon was shot by Chapman after returning to his apartment with Yoko after hours in the studio, recording and polishing a song by Yoko, "Walking on Thin Ice." Like several of her tracks on both Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey, the final, posthumous release of original music by Lennon, Yoko was merging her avant-garde musical sensibilities with post-punk and post-disco styles, making use of synthesizers and drum machines in a way that didn't make her music that foreign to what would soon be called "New Wave" on early 1980s American radio. That doesn't mean the song itself is very good, despite Lennon apparently declaring in the studio, perhaps less than a hour before his murder, that "you just cut your first number one, Yoko." By my hearing, Yoko's better stuff was, appropriately, that which she released in conjunction with her husband's final tracks. That's not the only reason to take Milk and Honey seriously, though.

I wasn't looking forward to listening to this album. I figured that, even if I give Yoko the benefit of the doubt and assume that she genuinely believed these left-over tracks from the Double Fantasy sessions were good enough to be deserving of public release, as a way to honor her late husband and his legions of fans, the results couldn't possibly avoid feeling like a cash grab. Well, I was wrong; Milk and Honey feels instead like a definite studio production in it's own right. Not a perfect one; it definitely has some filler on it among John's stuff. "(Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess" is an unfinished, sappy ditty, and "Grow Old With Me" is a weak demo recording of a song of great, but completely unrealized, potential. But the energy and wit that Double Fantasy showed Lennon re-embracing after years away from the studio are very much on display on "I'm Stepping Out" (a delightfully poppy number), "I Don't Wanna Face It" (a slick, bluesy rocker), and especially "Nobody Told Me," easily one of the smartest, catchiest, grooviest pop songs that Lennon ever recorded in his entire career, solo or with the Beatles; why it wasn't on Double Fantasy in the place of one of the weaker tracks like "Cleanup Time" makes no sense to me at all. And then there's "Borrowed Time," an underproduced recording that manages to be charming and unintentionally haunting at the same time. 

And as for Yoko? While her tracks aren't in dialogue with John's as happens in the best parts of Double Fantasy--which would have been truly perverse if she'd tried, since she went to work on this album in 1983--several of them stand up as solid, if sometimes slight, dance and electronica-pop. "Sleepness Night" has too much of her patented (and often tired) transgressiveness to really be enjoyable, and "O' Sanity" is just silly, but "Don't Be Scared" is an actually compelling little mystery of a song, "Your Hands" is a dreamlike ballad, "Let Me Count the Ways" remarkably actually makes me see Yoko as a mother singing a lullaby to Sean, and "You're the One," with it's spooky compelling cricket chirps, should have been a single: I would put it alongside some of the best weird pop put out by Blondie, Kate Bush, or Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Overall, I give Milk and Honey a B+, the same as Double Fantasy, something I definitely did not expect. Which means that if we rank all of Lennon's, and Lennon and Ono's, post-Beatles albums together, it looks something like this:

Rock 'n' Roll: A

Imagine: A- 

Double Fantasy: B+

Milk and Honey: B+

Plastic Ono Band: B 

Walls and Bridges: B

Mind Games: B-

Some Time in New York City: D+ 

In retrospect, when I compare this list to my summary of Paul McCartney's far larger -post-Beatles output (23 albums at the time I wrote that review, and I wasn't even counting everything he'd put out--including leaving aside two cover albums which this journey though John's work made me go back and review properly), I think I've been nicer to John than he deserves. But then again--perhaps Paul's own constant output simply invites unfair comparisons? Who knows how I would have felt about Macca if he'd slowed down, been less of omnipresent workhorse? But it's not as though I could ever truly ask for less from Paul, the Best Beatle. And similarly, I'd give just about anything if John, the First Beatle, could have been spared, and we could have heard more from him. A tragedy, in so many ways. But he left his mark, both through his band and on his own--and, crucially, through the artistic and emotional impact he had on work of his greatest partners. On the day he died, in the final interview he gave, John commented "There’s only two artists I’ve ever worked with for more than one night’s stand, as it were: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. I think that’s a pretty damned good choice." I couldn't possibly disagree.

 

Listening to Lennon #7: Double Fantasy

Double Fantasy is an iconic album, for obvious reasons. Leaving behind Los Angeles, May Pang, the experiments (and exasperation) in the studio of Walls and Bridges, and the legal headaches (and rock and roll delights) of cranking out old covers on Rock 'n' Roll, Lennon settled back in New York City and reconciled with Yoko Ono, who gave birth to their one child together, Sean Lennon, on October 9, 1975. And Lennon promptly left the music business to focus on his son for close to five years. When he returned with Double Fantasy, his first musical collaboration with Ono since Some Time in New York City eight years before, he was 40 years old, looking into the 1980s, and ready for another stage in his life. And, of course, was tragically murdered less than a month after the album's official release. How could such a story not lend the album it left behind a certain mystique? 

But there's even more to it than that. There's Lennon's wild experience while sailing to Bermuda in June 1980, when sickness and fatigue left every other member of the crew unable to handle the ship's wheel, and Lennon guided the boat alone through a storm for six hours. He came out of that challenge invigorated, excited, but also feeling vulnerable in a manner unlike that produced by his many journeys through various therapies years before, and desperately wanting to make music again. There is, of course, his constant, never-finished feelings of affection and competition with Paul McCartney; "Coming Up," a disco-ish, heavily synthesized and drum machine-driven tune Macca had recorded in the summer of 1979, was released in advance of McCartney II in the spring of 1980, and John loved it--"It's driving me crackers!" he supposedly said, reigniting his competitive drive. (To be clear, while I like the song, I don't care much for the album.) And there was the increasing artistic maturity of his relationship with Yoko; the post-punk music in the clubs of NYC in the late 1970s, from the Talking Heads to the B-52s, struck him as providing a new idiom for some of Ono's avant-garde sensibilities, strongly calling him to write alongside them again. All together, by the summer of 1980, John and Yoko were both writing songs, and come the autumn they were in the recording studio--though keeping the news of their imminent re-emergence on the pop music scene as much a secret as possible. I wish I had memories of the impact of Lennon's return late in that year, but I wasn't a Beatles fan at age 11--and within weeks, the story of the Smart Beatle making music again was overwhelmed by the news of his death.

I can understand how the initial reviews of the album were less than enthusiastic, as most of the first side is only occasionally captivating. "(Just Like) Starting Over" is a fine and catchy pop song, but beyond the initial listening, it seems a little pleading. Ono's "Kiss Kiss Kiss" definitely shows a greater pop sensibility than what's she'd brought into the studio in the past, but still, this insistent faux-orgasm of a song is kind of embarrassing. Then comes Lennon's "Cleanup Time"--again, a nice effort at a soulful rocker, but nothing special, followed by Ono's "Give Me Something," which is just an unfinished dance-club riff.

But then listeners to the album are rewarded with a run of songs that shows not just how talented a musician Lennon was, but also smart, how capable of seeing, both musically and lyrically, how to put a musical statement together. "I'm Losing You" is a sharp, deeply introspective, self-critical, while still insistent number; it folds directly into Ono's "I'm Moving On," which is I think the first time in this whole series that I've heard her singing voice--pitched to accentuate the growling anger of the song--truly complement an arrangement (though she still insists on that weird cackle at the end). The songs are genuinely in conversation with each other, a conversation that one can imagine capturing key moments from all the ups and downs of John and Yoko's marriage over the years. Then comes the simply gorgeous, calypso-flavored lullaby/love song to Sean, "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)," followed by "Watching the Wheels," one of the very few straight-up superb pop songs whose autobiographical focus amounts to actual, rather than ersatz, Zen philosophy ("Ah, people asking questions / lost in confusion / Well, I tell them there's no problem / only solutions"). Yoko's "Yes, I'm Your Angel" is another smart take on her odd musical presence, turning her into in a vaudeville chanteuse. And then the best song on the album: Lennon's "Woman." Lennon called this, in an interview before his murder, a grown-up Beatles tune, the way he and the lads would have recorded "Girl" if they'd had more years and wisdom under their belts. It's by no means a fully feminist song; Lennon never achieved the kind of empathy that McCartney could manufacture on a moment's notice. But for an Englishman born and raised in the 1940s and 1950s, especially one with the complicated (and, yes, partly self-induced) traumas that Lennon carried, his desire for forgiveness and his expression of appreciation for what women have meant for him--particularly his soulmate Yoko, but also just the presence of the maternal and the feminine in his life generally--in this simple but still lush and melodious song is truly kind of beautiful, I think.

Yoko dominates the rest of the album with a few forgettable (though thankfully not particularly screechy) songs, with one last poppy, sappy ditty from John: "Dear Yoko." But overall, Lennon had every reason to be proud of this album; it's a strong B+ collection of songs. Tragic that he ended up having so little time to reflect on what he and his wife had accomplished.