📧 from Mac Loftin

Thanks for this message, and I appreciate the careful and critical read of my essay. I know the Century’s submission process is backed up, but you should condense this down to a letter to the editor. They frequently publish critical letters.

Just as a quick response over email, I think you might have gotten the wrong impression from the essay. I’m not claiming that the group’s reading (or really readings, there was a lot of disagreement) is mine, or that my reading is theirs. All I was doing was situating the members in the group in a lineage of antiwar readings of Homer that includes Euripides and Weil, and then using all those different readings as a jumping off point to offer my own. We writers don’t get to write our own headlines, and I get that the headline might have given the impression that my reading was somehow coming from the group, rather than my own reading that is the fruit of many conversations and readings over the years. 

One point of possible disagreement between us, which I don’t believe came out in the article, is that I don’t think the members of the group have a clearer view on war simply because they have perpetrated it. One of the things Homer is very much attuned to (this is Weil’s point) is how war warps our perception of it, whether we are its perpetrators or its victims or its beneficiaries. (And for what it’s worth, I think you have things backwards with the Jeremiah example. America much more closely resembles the expansionist Babylonian Empire than the conquered backwater of Judah. A closer scriptural parallel for our situation is Revelation 18.)

Thank you again—it’s always encouraging to be read with such attention.