📧 to Mac Loftin

Thanks for the reply, and for the specific pushback — I want to take it seriously rather than just restate myself.

On the letter to the editor: I won't be sending Century a condensed version, and I won't be pitching them anything else either. I have a documented history with Christian Century — they solicited a piece from me a few years back, encouraged it for months, then rejected it once I turned it in. I'm happy to send you that record so you have the full context for why I'm declining that route specifically, not out of pique at you.

On the misreading: I hear that you're not claiming the group's reading is yours or yours is theirs, and that the headline oversold the connection. But I don't think that resolves the thing I'm actually pointing at. You're right that Weil's insight cuts across perpetrator, victim, and beneficiary alike — war warps perception regardless of where you stand in it. But I'd ask: who taught you that in the first place? An antiwar reading doesn't arrive from nowhere. It comes from somewhere, usually from people who paid for the knowledge. Even when you're not claiming their reading as your own, you're still drawing authority from proximity to them, from the room, from the fact that veterans were present and grappling with the text, while keeping the actual content of their authority — their standing to revise or contest your thesis — outside the piece. That's the appropriation I'm naming. Agreeing with someone while declining to let them talk back is still a way of keeping them in their place.

And on Judah and Babylon: point taken, and I think you're right that America maps more easily onto empire than remnant. But notice what that does to your own position. If we are Babylon, then the people most qualified to name that from the inside aren't public theologians reading Homer at a comfortable remove. They're the ones who did the empire's fighting. The Odyssey is a mourning song sung by people who watched the ships burn, not by people narrating the fire from shore.

I'll say plainly: if you don't want to reply publicly, that's your call, and I mean that without sarcasm. But I want to be straightforward that I intend to publish this exchange, in full, as a continuation of a public piece responding to a public column. Silence is itself a public response, and I'll treat it as one. I'd still rather you spoke for yourself in it than have me be the only voice characterizing what you meant.