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New York Times Op-Ed: ‘I Shall Be Very Surprised if There Isn’t a Next Chapter’: A Q&A With Sarah Coakley, by Peter Wehner (Trinity Forum):

The Rev. Dr. Sarah Coakley is one of the most original and consequential theologians in the world. An Anglican priest and philosopher of religion, she was the first woman elected the Norris-Hulse professor of divinity at Cambridge, a chair she held until 2018, and before that she was the Mallinckrodt professor of divinity at Harvard. She is the author of eight books, including “God, Sexuality and the Self,” the first volume of her projected four-part systematic theology.

I spoke to Dr. Coakley about why she decided, at a young age, that she wanted to be a theologian; the times she has wanted to disbelieve in God but never quite could; and her attempt to reunite academic theology with the life of the church and the practice of prayer. Contemplative prayer, Dr. Coakley said, is a “crucible of purification.” …

1. Origins. Sarah Coakley: From very earliest childhood, in a way that I can’t even now explain, God seemed to me to be an obvious and holy reality. And I’m therefore very much a once-born, as William James put it. I’ve never had a conversion experience. There have been times when I’ve wanted not to believe in God. There are lots of good reasons for not believing in God, and sometimes those reasons have seemed overwhelming. But I have great difficulty in not believing in God.

Peter Wehner:  You told Robert Lawrence Kuhn in an interview that you’ve often wanted not to believe in God for a lot of rational reasons, but you found it very difficult. Could you elaborate on that? Is the reason you find yourself wanting to disbelieve in God intellectual? And why did you find yourself coming back to God?

Coakley: The times when I’ve wanted to give it all up had to do partly with frustration with the institution of the church. They’re often very bad institutions, frankly. But the more important theological existential side has been an overwhelming sensibility about the way that God either abandons or oppresses us at times. And it’s that very bizarre combination of oppressive presence but at the same time abandonment. It is described probably more profoundly than anywhere else in Christian tradition in John of the Cross’s second dark night, the night of spirit, but also in Martin Luther’s Deus absconditus, the “hidden God.”

Christianity Today: What a Painfully Weird Movie Can Show Us About Lying and Liars, by Russell Moore:

Nathan Fielder is not for everyone.

The kind of person who can’t watch the “Scott’s Tots” episode of The Office because of the cringe factor would never make it through Fielder’s characteristic awkwardness. This time it was on display in his new film, You Can See Everything, in which Fielder spends time with even-more-awkward Elizabeth Holmes—convicted of defrauding stockholders with her Theranos blood-testing device—and her cartoonishly narcissistic romantic partner during the last weeks before Holmes’s incarceration. The primary frustration for moviegoers so far, though, is not the weirdness of it all, but the fact that the film does not live up to its title.

In one sense, you can see everything in this movie—so much so that you wonder why these people ever agreed to let these cameras into their home. You can see Holmes’s manipulation, the boyfriend’s sociopathy, and Fielder’s ethical shadiness and emotional complicity playing out on the screen. You can see Holmes’s parents trying to maintain stability while expressing anguish and perhaps even repressed shame on their faces. What audiences say they can’t see, though, is the answer to the question they want to know: Is this convicted fraudster a serial liar or a dupe who’s deluded?