Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
I sent Bo a seven-page show proposal this week, which is roughly six and a half pages more than the bullet points he normally sends me the day before. It came out of a lecture I gave in my Luther Seminary class where I kept telling Bo stories as examples, and finally thought — I should just try this out on Bo instead of writing the essay. He printed it out this morning and the printer asked if he wanted all seven pages. Here's the idea. The parable of the Good Samaritan answers "who is my neighbor?" by changing the category. The neighbor stops being the man in the ditch and becomes the one who stopped. Which means, in our late-modern moment, the question is not a category question at all. It's a capacity question. Do you still have the subjectivity to be seized by another person? Or has the achieving subject — optimized, accelerated, scheduled, closed — lost the ability to have a neighbor at all? Bo warned me up front that he was going to be so honest people might think he's a jerk. He was not a jerk. His house is gutted for air quality, his wife can't live there, his church is doing fall kickoff, there's a family crisis, and there's a guy sleeping on the church steps he had to walk around to let his plumbers in. This one has the Princeton Good Samaritan experiment, a blank check from a man who turned his hearing aids off during my sermons, and a food pantry that had to be completely redesigned once they actually got to know their neighbors. Come sit with it.
I sent Bo a seven-page show proposal this week, which is roughly six and a half pages more than the bullet points he normally sends me the day before. It came out of a lecture I gave in my Luther Seminary class where I kept telling Bo stories as examples, and finally thought — I should just try this out on Bo instead of writing the essay. He printed it out this morning and the printer asked if he wanted all seven pages. Here's the idea. The parable of the Good Samaritan answers "who is my neighbor?" by changing the category. The neighbor stops being the man in the ditch and becomes the one who stopped. Which means, in our late-modern moment, the question is not a category question at all. It's a capacity question. Do you still have the subjectivity to be seized by another person? Or has the achieving subject — optimized, accelerated, scheduled, closed — lost the ability to have a neighbor at all? Bo warned me up front that he was going to be so honest people might think he's a jerk. He was not a jerk. His house is gutted for air quality, his wife can't live there, his church is doing fall kickoff, there's a family crisis, and there's a guy sleeping on the church steps he had to walk around to let his plumbers in. This one has the Princeton Good Samaritan experiment, a blank check from a man who turned his hearing aids off during my sermons, and a food pantry that had to be completely redesigned once they actually got to know their neighbors. Come sit with it.
