Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Bo listened to last week's Jamie Smith conversation and came back this Friday with a follow-up on his own — Jamie has been Bo's favorite frenemy for a decade, and the dark-night processing changed the conversation in ways Bo did not see coming. Which turned out to be the perfect on-ramp for the actual topic of the hour: Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher I have been walking my Luther Seminary class through this month, whose diagnosis of late modernity is the closest thing anyone has written to a technical explanation of what Jamie is describing pastorally. The core move is the expulsion of the other. The self forms in relation to genuine otherness — the friction, distance, mystery, and resistance of another person or an unfamiliar tradition. We have used technology to eliminate that friction and chosen the frictionless comfort of the self. Han's word for what we get instead is the hell of the same. The elevated rates of depression, burnout, loneliness, ADHD, and narcissism running through our culture, Han insists, are not infections from something external. They are infarctions — internal blockages from an excess of positivity. Along the way: Bo's blood-hymn story from his non-religious Canadian friend's first time in a church, the paragraph in the United Methodist Book of Discipline that mandates ministering to the neighborhood not the ghosts of the past, Bo's discovery that in a red state most of his congregants are the only Democrat they know, Bo's Strava confession, and the smartphone as modern rosary. If you have the itch to smash the machines by the end of the hour, Han's own solution is not Luddism — it is the recovery of friendliness. Come sit with this one.
Bo listened to last week's Jamie Smith conversation and came back this Friday with a follow-up on his own — Jamie has been Bo's favorite frenemy for a decade, and the dark-night processing changed the conversation in ways Bo did not see coming. Which turned out to be the perfect on-ramp for the actual topic of the hour: Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher I have been walking my Luther Seminary class through this month, whose diagnosis of late modernity is the closest thing anyone has written to a technical explanation of what Jamie is describing pastorally. The core move is the expulsion of the other. The self forms in relation to genuine otherness — the friction, distance, mystery, and resistance of another person or an unfamiliar tradition. We have used technology to eliminate that friction and chosen the frictionless comfort of the self. Han's word for what we get instead is the hell of the same. The elevated rates of depression, burnout, loneliness, ADHD, and narcissism running through our culture, Han insists, are not infections from something external. They are infarctions — internal blockages from an excess of positivity. Along the way: Bo's blood-hymn story from his non-religious Canadian friend's first time in a church, the paragraph in the United Methodist Book of Discipline that mandates ministering to the neighborhood not the ghosts of the past, Bo's discovery that in a red state most of his congregants are the only Democrat they know, Bo's Strava confession, and the smartphone as modern rosary. If you have the itch to smash the machines by the end of the hour, Han's own solution is not Luddism — it is the recovery of friendliness. Come sit with this one.
