📧 to Mac Loftin

I'm a combat veteran and independent theologian writing on war and Christian theology (most recently God Is a Grunt, Hachette 2022). I read your Christian Century column on reading The Odyssey with veterans at the VA with real interest, and I think we agree on more than we disagree about; the antiwar reading you trace through Weil, the debt to Shay, the refusal to let Nolan's version stand uncorrected.

I've written a response, up on my own site rather than pitched to Century (their submissions are currently closed). It presses on two places I don't think the piece fully reckons with: whether the veterans in your reading group get to be authorities who could revise the thesis, or mainly company for one you'd already reached elsewhere: and what it costs, or doesn't cost, to will a nation's collapse as a theological good from a position that won't have to live inside it. It's direct, and in places sharp — I'd rather you hear that from me than find it cold.

Here's the piece: https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/who-wills-the-collapse/ 

I'd genuinely welcome a response. If you want to write one in full, in part, or simply to tell me where I've got it wrong, I'll publish it on my site alongside the original, unedited, at whatever length you need. No obligation either way, I mean it as the same right of reply I'd want extended to me.

I'll also say: given that Twilight of the Christian West is explicitly a theology of mourning, I think this is exactly the argument worth having, and I'd rather have it with you directly than only about you.