We’re not big on denying our appetites these days. “Suppressing” is what we call it, and we say it’s not “healthy”. And we say it’s not “healthy” because the goal in life—we believe—is to be “happy”. In previous centuries the goal of life was to attain virtue. But now, it’s to be “happy”. And while I could get into the historical weeds about how and when this shift in the Western worldview occurred, I’ve decided that any such digression would only be a distraction from the main point of this essay: that hedonism has an expiration date. And if you don’t acknowledge the expiration date of your hedonism—insisting that your life can always be one big party that lasts forever and ever, no matter how many years pass and no matter how old you get—you will eventually wind up bitter, ugly, anxious, and alone.

In 2025, the term “Judeo-Christian” is about as popular among the right as celery sticks at a pizza party. This is because a small but particularly loud and influential segment of the religious right has an annoying allergy to coalition building. Rightwing religious Jews (who won’t ally with Christians out of suspicion that said alliance would eventually culminate in attempts to convert them) don’t like the term “Judeo-Christian” because… well… they don’t like the idea of their religion sharing a hyphen with a religion that—in their mind—is entirely separate and idolatrous. Radical traditionalist Catholics (who won’t ally with Jews because of good ol’ fashioned medieval antisemitism, and won’t ally with Protestants due to bitterness over the Reformation) don’t like the term “Judeo-Christian” because the only group they dislike more than Protestants are Jews. And “Christian Nationalist” Protestants (who also won’t ally with Catholics due to * checks notes * bitterness over the Reformation) don’t like the term “Judeo-Christian” because the only group they dislike more than Catholics are Jews. Incidentally, none of these people are particularly good at organizing real formidable opposition when mobs of leftwing activists and violent men from Islamic countries come a’knockin. Each little group likes to silo themselves off and think they can take on (and take down) liberal cultural degeneracy and migrant crime all by themselves. Rejecting a massive cavalry of thoroughbreds, they ride into battle as a small pathetic cluster straddling shetland ponies. Folly. Extremely sectarian people are useless. Actually they’re worse than useless, because most of the time they actively try to prevent interfaith political coalitions from forming, rather than going away and keeping their disagreements to themselves. In opposition to these people (complete and unabashed), I would like to defend both the term “Judeo-Christian” and the aspiration behind the term: which is for Jews and Christians to grow close to one another, and find common cause at a time when both groups are under attack by the same enemies.

Perhaps, if the Holy Father wanted to act in a way that was consistent with how he wants every other country to behave (at least in the West), he would lead by example and order that the Vatican walls be torn down, stop enforcing checkpoints, and fire all his armed security.

Not even seventy years ago, to be an “intellectual” meant you had a habitual curiosity you couldn’t break. It meant that you were prone to pondering great questions—of existence, of truth, of custom, of past and future—in company and in solitude, and that you had a reputation for steering conversations in philosophical, historical, scientific, or mathematical directions. It meant one of your personality traits was that of being intellectually insatiable. It meant you told witty jokes at dinner parties, and talked at length about your favorite artistic movement, and liked to read long novels by the sea. There was no barrier to entry. No committee to confer upon you worthiness or unworthiness. You could be an intellectual if you decided you wanted to be, just as one could decide upon a number of other characteristics like being stylish, outdoorsy, or athletic. But by 1963, designating someone an “intellectual” meant something entirely different. Being an intellectual meant you went to college. It meant you were good at sitting at a desk for hours each day and listening to another person talk. It meant having the right piece of paper with the right words on it in order for you to tell others who didn’t have that piece of paper that you knew more about a subject than they did. Why 1963 specifically?

The exhortation to “love ourselves” has been used to enrich therapists, sell beauty products, and fill vacancies at spas and resorts. But no doubt plenty of well-meaning people also propose it genuinely as much as they do ignorantly, without ulterior motive; seeing lack of “loving ourselves” as the root cause of self-esteem issues ranging from eating disorders to suicide, especially in young people. Yet I rather suspect, like contemporary culture writer Freddie deBoer, that “Mentally healthy people, if they still exist, aren’t healthy because of the constant presence of positive feelings of self. They are healthy because of the habitual absence of any feelings of self.” That is, that what we perceive in another person as “confidence”, “self-esteem”, and “loving oneself”, is really what a person looks like when they don’t think about themselves at all. That the key to a “love of self” is to simply detach yourself, as much as possible, from the internal monologue in your head. That the antidote to self-consciousness is minimal consciousness of the self. But there is also a second way we can think about “loving ourselves”. A more spiritual way. One that a person can resort to if, for whatever reason, simply detaching from or quieting down one’s inner monologue doesn’t work and rumination persists.

There’s a fallacy currently running through the “storytelling culture”—both in cinema and in literature, but primarily in cinema—that says simple stories can’t have depth because they’re simple. In order for a story to be deep and profound and to have “permanency” in a media landscape constantly churning out new content, the plot has to be non-linear, it has to go in a lot of different directions/have a lot of subplots, it needs to be “subtle” in its philosophical verdicts, and/or have an anti-climactic or inconclusive ending. “This is storytelling for smart people, see,” begins the tone dripping with condescension, “And if you fail to appreciate it as such, well, you just don’t get it and maybe you should content yourself with watching mindless corporate franchise films with explosions and tits.”