Grace through the Cracks

a response to our talk at Maryhouse

This response to Cracks in PoMo’s presentation at the Catholic Worker Maryhouse on 12/13/24 was originally published in the March-April 2025 edition of the Catholic Worker newspaper

On December 13th of last year, the NY Catholic Worker hosted an event with Cracks in PoMo, an online media outlet and literary collective that explores the cultural dynamics of postmodernity through Substack articles, podcasts and other content. Creator and curator Stephen Adubato, along with regular contributors Brennan Vickery and Emilia Tanu, offered accounts of the project's theoretical underpinnings and cultural mission. Adubato described how the aesthetic perspective of postmodernity allows us to notice the "cracks" in our worldview -- generative fissures through which God's grace shines -- and how the platform's project is to trace those cracks.

While Cracks in Pomo is not "officially" Catholic, it does have a strong underlying Catholic ethos, emanating from Adubato's own faith. He has an outspoken reverence for the Catholic Worker and the legacy of Dorothy Day (in his words, "Dorothy Day, an OG girl boss and one of the greatest ever to crack postmodernity"), and sometimes brings his Seton Hall students to visit Maryhouse.

But unlike the Catholic Worker, whose publication is founded on a sense of moral mission that foregrounds concrete political commitments, Cracks “gives precedence to aesthetics and ontology over ethics and politics”, and is, in a sense, politically neutral. It's not so much about "changing the world", as observing it, with philosophical wit, self-aware humor and a sprinkle of moral-theological critique. Given this difference of emphasis, certain productive tensions arose in the discussion at that night's meeting (a meeting which was strikingly well attended, a testament to Cracks' popularity, and the deep chord it strikes in the current cultural consciousness).

To be precise, I should say that I personally found myself contemplating those questions. I'm relatively new to the Catholic Worker community, and still in the earliest phases of exploring the radical consequences of a "lived faith." I'm also new to Catholicism (currently being catechized, round two, after having gotten cold feet the first time); and so questions about the the role of religion in contemporary society, and how it does, or doesn't, fundamentally call us to forms of radical action, are very much at the forefront of my mind.

My question, in essence, was: What does this have to do with action? There we were discussing how a postmodern playfulness allows us to see the strange and absurd beauty of things; but how does that revelation of beauty connect to the radical doing to which we are called? How does the aestheticized Catholic perspective of Cracks in PoMo relate to the action-oriented perspective of the Catholic Worker tradition? I could put the same question in terms that Jane Sammon once asked me, in a different context of discernment: "What does this have to do with the poor?"

While Cracks doesn't present itself as having an "activist" or "political" project, there are indeed political dimensions to its offerings. Some of its contributors have right-leaning sensibilities, which has sometimes led to the project being misconstrued. Another layer to this complexity is the connection between its cultural milieu and the "trad Cath" movement of NYC's Dimes Square, a subculture combining elements of hipsterism, traditional religion, and right-leaning politics -- as Adubato describes it an "irony-pilled, Nietzschean, performative Catholicism." At a certain point, when the broader culture of moral permissiveness leaves you nothing else to reject, the most punk thing you can be is Catholic, in the dazzling circular continuum of cultural identity, rebellion and return.

But for Adubato, it's not about aligning with this or that political stance, or this or that "scene"; it's about opening up a space that transcends the political and cultural categories that are currently on offer. "There's something that comes before politics", as he said in a later conversation. That "something" is, ultimately, the essence of religious experience -- the encounter with reality that subsists beneath the ideological layers of our culture, and the masks of our identities. It's this encounter that Cracks aims to crack into, by means of critical interrogation of our current cultural matrices.

Breaking down ideological boundaries is an inspiring proposition for this informational age, in which so much of our identities is bound up with the way we perform our political allegiances, both in person and online. My involvement with the Catholic Worker has been a kind of refuge from the unquestioning ideological leftism in which my own activism had formerly moved. There are secular liberal spaces which, in their very liberality, have a kind of rigid illiberalism, a microcosmic manifestation of Karl Popper's "paradox of tolerance". It's been refreshing, at the Catholic Worker, to occasionally encounter "contradictions", where supposedly "leftist" or "rightist" commitments can co-exist in one community, or one person, deriving their values not from the ideological structures that our media typically enforce, but from stubbornly irreducible Christian faith. In the words of Christopher Watkins' Biblical Critical Theory, Christianity has the power to "diagonalize" typical political dichotomies.

At the same time, precisely what has attracted me to the Catholic Worker is the inseparability of religion and politics -- the acknowledgement that no political question really falls outside the domain of Christ's radical call. As my friend Liam Myers once very convincingly said, "religion is politics." Even if aesthetics and ontology take precedence over ethics and politics, they remain related and inseparable, especially in a catholic frame of reference, whether with an upper- or lowercase "c".

Given all of these dynamics, I at first felt simultaneously fascinated by, and unsure about, Cracks' cultural project and perspective. Was this aestheticism for its own sake, or was there something liberatory about it? After all, doesn't all this matter quite a lot right now, as we seem to be hurling into a post-liberal society, with a Christian right allying itself with a technocratic oligarchy, in the midst of unprecedented ecological crisis and genocide? Can one really be artfully neutral in "times like these"?

But, in classic personalist fashion, these conceptual dichotomies dissolved when I got to actually know the people, as people. In conversations with Adubato and Vickery, I could feel their passion and sincerity as writers and thinkers -- and I came to feel that opening up these aesthetic cracks is itself a form of resistance, resistance against the ideological constraints of our time. The mission of Cracks is not to affirm a studied neutrality, hiding from political commitments in aestheticism, but to create the preconditions for free thought and action. It challenges the ethical and political assumptions of garden variety leftism, but it does so in the service of actually disrupting the existing system. And when I say "system" I don't just mean it in the external "filthy rotten" sense of our governmental and economic systems, but the internal ideological and psychological systems that structure our experience in the secular world.

Adubato's writing traces a complex ambivalence toward "scenester Christianity", contrasting it with the "unironically Christian" simplicity of the Catholic Worker. He's not interested in "tradition" for its own sake, but reclaiming the radical apparatus of critique that a religious perspective can offer. "Fetishization of dogma happens when you don’t have a real community," as he remarked in our later conversation. At the same time, there is something important and liberatory about this renewed instinct for tradition and dogma: the will to recover something that has been lost in a culture of individualism and moral indifference.

The subtle distinction between these liberatory aesthetics, and the pitfalls of a merely performative Catholic aestheticism, brings to mind Hans Urs von Balthasar's distinction between theological aesthetics and aesthetic theology. The former refers to the transcendental role of Beauty in revealing aspects of God's being in the world, whereas the latter refers to the tendency for some theology to prioritize beauty for its own sake, in a shallow and ultimately anesthetizing way. Theological aesthetics finds beauty in the tragic Christian drama in which we're all called to play our sacrificial roles; aesthetic theology is when religion tells you "don't worry, everything's beautiful" even when things are clearly not okay.

The instinct to foreground “aesthetics and ontology” only lacks substance if it doesn’t beckon you into that role if it doesn't beckon you into that role of sacrifice and transformation -- if Beauty does not attach itself to the other classical transcendentals, Goodness and Truth. Not only can Beauty help you get to Goodness and Truth, and to God, but, as Balthasar would have it, and as Adubato would perhaps agree, you can't get there without it. Beauty is the precondition for our radical re-encounter with reality; and this can take the form of contemplating an intricate cathedral fresco, or engaging in intricate analysis of a meme.

This is especially vital in this cultural moment, one in which the informational self, and the gesture of self-presentation, is so central to our experience. We encounter the world through the curated screens of self-presentation that our phones offer, and that screen stays up, psychologically, even when your phone is in your pocket. This interior frontier is a vital one to recognize, for the Worker's ongoing mission. Dorothy Day had introduced the first issue of The Catholic Worker, "For those who are huddling in shelters trying to escape the rain....For those who think there is no hope for the future...this little paper is addressed." There are still so many unhoused in this country, without homes, work or hope. But within that fundamental continuity, the essence of the cultural moment has changed in the near-century since she wrote those words. Far outnumbering the physically homeless, there are the ideologically dispossessed, the spiritually unhoused, psychically displaced by the over-saturation of information and the demands of identity performance and self-commodification.

In this climate, even "doing the right thing", can become a kind of unexamined performance -- subsuming one's identity into one's activism, one's leftism, one's radical politics. ("Look, here I am at the Catholic Worker, serving the poor!", on Instagram stories.) But for me, the Worker has been one place where I've been able to not just physically, but even spiritually, put my phone away. And I think Cracks in Pomo is trying to cultivate that same miracle of self-dislodgment, even though it comes in the form of content to be read on your phone -- and while that may be paradoxical, there's nothing foreign to Catholicism about paradox.

From my own still liminal perspective, the Church itself is a site of generative contradiction, where conflicting identities are able to dwell under one roof. Hence, while many of the Catholics that I'm getting to know here at the Worker and in related communities justifiably lament its failure to live up to its own moral invitations, I, as a convert in process, am also feeling a tremendous sense of opportunity -- and hope -- in the Church. In fact I'm seeing this whole moment, this moment where maybe liberalism itself is ending and the secular age along with it, as a moment of hopeful transformation -- one in which the Church, and communities like this one, are able to hold contradictions, things that shouldn't fit together but do, bursting the old wineskins of our cultural identities.

I've seen this in rural Christian communities that vote "right" but are nonetheless committed to collaborative ecological restoration; I've seen it in young people returning to faith in a rebellious effort to reclaim moral cogency; and I see it in the cracks that Cracks in Pomo opens, and in the large and lively crowds that it draws to Maryhouse.

This era of opportunity -- of contradiction and synthesis -- is one that my friend Colin Pugh calls "the Molecular Postsecular": the "MoPo", that waits on the other side of "PoMo." The way out of the trap of our ideologies is to recognize the molecular structure of our physical, social and spiritual worlds, the plurality in our unity, the material subsidiarity of the community of being. God and Matter are what matters, and it can take beauty -- even of a paradoxical, ironic and infinitely subtle kind -- to reawaken us to the intricacy of those relations. Sometimes we see our incompleteness, our interdependency, most completely, when we view ourselves through mirrors with cracks.