I spend a lot of time suspicious of speculation. I have argued, in my academic and theological writing, that there is something inherently alienating about our human relationship with the artificial, with the imagined, with the unreal. I have taught and cited Plato’s allegory of the cave; taught and cited, too, the aesthetic retreats of the French decadents — the subject of my doctoral dissertation — for whom the love of art doubled as a theological statement about the desiccation of nature. I’ve written extensively about my conviction that there is, in fact, such a thing as art — be it a film or a text or a painting — that can morally or spiritually warp us, even if, especially if, it possesses the power to move us aesthetically. One of the worst things we can do as human beings, I think, is lie about the nature of reality.
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