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My favorite part of this is that I am just nodding furiously along to seventy-five or eighty percentage of each one of these paragraphs only for there to be just a zinger ("whatever ending might come to us will come...by the deus ex machina of grace") that I both heartily disagree with and which never would have occurred to me to even assert. Which is good both as a provocation and an invitation to a more complete understanding.

I think the sincere mode is still imperative for the same reason it was revealing its imperativeness in like the late eighties, and I abhor irony about as loudly as I did when the realization first descended upon me twenty years ago. I loved your description of what you were exploring as you wrote Social Creature, and I'd be interested in your take on how much of your Christianity resonates as a *solution to* or *resolution of* the "self-doubt, and anxiety, [regarding] a New York full of shifting, Escher-esque social ladders, and surrealist status games."

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