Damn Amy Grant
How Do We Get There From Here
I don’t know for sure because I’m just beginning, but this will likely be the most random post you ever receive from me. I don’t have time to edit. Might not even make sense.
Still, I can make clear what kind of day this is. It is 4:37PM in Nashville. I have next to me a bowl of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream with Trader Joe’s Organic Hot Chocolate sprinkled on it. Does the organic even matter?
I had an ultrasound vascular study done this morning and have already received a kind letter from Doctor Callahan stating I will not “shuffle off this mortal coil" via this particular health issue.
Which brings me to global health. Kind of big day for it in the most general, cosmic sense, unless you are Iranian, then it’s likely specific—top of mind.
Here’s some Iranian folks standing around a power plant. They didn’t get the memo. According to the President: “The Iranian people, when they don't hear bombs go off, they're upset. They want to hear bombs, because they want to be free. And the only reason they're not out protesting . . . is because they were informed that, if they protest . . . they will be shot immediately.”
Before I go there any further though, yes, I have been thinking global health, especially as it relates to women and children and the turning back of the clock and meds for stuff we already figured was easily cured. So, anyway, a table full of us here in Nashville met up at the Thistle Farms Cafe with my friend Jenny Dyer of 2030 Collaborative and a well-spoken rep from the Gates Foundation. Lots of big-hearted, smart people there including my wife, Andi Ashworth, Becca Stevens (founder of Thistle Farms), Jeremy Cowart, Steve Taylor, Kimberly Williams Paisley and many more good folks including Jennifer Cooke and Amy Grant. However we can, we’d like to stir up our city (and beyond) afresh to take matters of global health more seriously—especially for women and children. BUT TODAY . . .
Global health is about the global consequences of a small group of Americans led by the President who waged war against Iran without the support of Congress or a majority of citizens. It’s about a Presidential post on Easter so unmasked and vile it even managed to wake the sleeping dogs at mainstream media. Destruction of civilizations will have that effect.
In fact, if the President had not completely ruined the F word with his use of it in the now infamous and godless Easter post, I wouldn’t mind type-shouting WTF right about now in this one. I would want it to sound more like an angry Irishman though, than the decades-old thought bubble voice of Trump now loud and fully unrestrained.
So, my Andi of 50+ years of girlfriending/spousaling fame has been off the news for a few days. Unfortunately I had to alert her to the possibility of earth and people devastation scheduled between 8PM and Midnight (EST) unless the Strait of Hormuz is open for business at 8PM (which is 3:30AM the next day there).
In the meantime, my youngest granddaughter turned 15 today and my youngest grandson, 18 over the weekend. 2026, the year of friends and family, America. Draw near.
Here’s Robert breaking his school’s record for clean lift, 320 lbs. I can’t remember the last time I did that. Aging, it’s rough.
See how fun a life of family and friends just doing stuff and junk can be? Lifting weights, fighting TB, eating lunch together, birthdays, writing songs—all that and so much more that isn’t even in the room with hate and violence.
Which is why, we let friends damn Amy Grant and ethicist/author Russell Moore use our home yesterday to film a video and record a podcast. I say damn Amy Grant because my friend guitarist Jerry McPherson, who spent many years playing and recording with Amy, derived pleasure from referring to her as damn Amy Grant. The irony being that she is the last human on the planet who would be referred to as damn (insert name). If you haven’t listened yet, I hope you’ll give a look and listen to my daughter-in-law’s cowrite and duet with Amy on “How Do We Get There From Here.” The compass of their hearts is pointed in the direction of community and love. Fill the room with this. Fill the world with it.
I mentioned the photographer/visionary artist Jeremy Cowart earlier. He made something that is generative and perfect for this moment. Take twenty minutes and walk through it. What is it? You can use a good surprise can’t you? It’s 100% private, so hold nothing back! HUMATHY
Until I started eating that bowl of ice cream as some sort of emotional fix for the epistemic collapse of society, I was wrapping up my book proposal for Pape Commons to pitch my novel, Once Concealed, Now Revealed.
It’s this sort of stuff:
Once Concealed, Now Revealed is literary fiction, the story of the Taylors, an American family with two sets of unspeakables, two generations apart, whose silence and avoidance isn’t the survival strategy they think it is. They’ll learn this devastating lesson together or it will be their death. Through the multi-genre punch of family saga, love story, and thriller, two questions haunt every page. Is there any person, place, or thing beyond redemption? Can love survive the crucible of the whole, unguarded truth?
Except, when done, it amounts to about forty pages of material that covers everything. When I say everything what I really mean is everything a writer doesn’t want to write after having spent months, years, writing the novel!
Wait, oh man, Don Pape, my agent just emailed. Who knows what a BISAC code is? Lot of writers on Substack. I know some of you know my pain. Since there is a love story thread in the novel, the industry refers to it as Romance. Don wants me to pick what kind of romance it is. He’s supposed to be my friend!
It’s not this: FIC027670 FICTION / Romance / Asian American & Pacific Islander. Or this: FIC027610 FICTION / Romance / Love Triangle, or this: FIC027090 FICTION / Romance / Time Travel. It’s not Romance / Fake Dating either or Romance / Firefighters. This is going to take longer than I thought. I’ll get back to you on it.
Until then, the ice cream is long gone, the headache is still here, and soon enough it will be 8PM EST.
It is a good norm to pray for our country’s brave men and women in harm’s way on our behalf. If praying for you looks like talking to the Author of all Generative Creativity, then pray now and especially the hours between 8PM CST and Midnight, that no unlawful, unjust harm is done in the name of United States of America against the innocent.
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
Daughter in law here. Guess how much I love this article on a scale of 1 to 100…:)
Job well doing, Dad. Words that must be spoken. Let all who have ears to hear do so.
Charlie, as usual, you capture something many of us are feeling: the jarring collision between ordinary, good life and the possibility of extraordinary harm unfolding at the same time.
I want to say clearly that my solidarity is with the innocent people in Iran who have no control over their government and yet bear the terror of war. It is both true that Iran’s regime is repressive and dangerous, and equally true that the Iranian people are not that regime. They are families, students, artists, children. Human beings whose lives carry the same weight as our own.
From both a Christian and a humanist perspective, it is very difficult to justify a war initiated without clear provocation, without broad democratic consent, and with predictable harm to civilians. The teachings of Christ point toward humility and care for the vulnerable. Humanist ethics center dignity and the reduction of suffering. On either foundation, this does not resolve into something virtuous. Rather, it raises serious moral concern.
And we should be honest about responsibility. This war did not simply “happen”...it was deliberately initiated by the President (and his bloodthirsty "Secretary of War") and by the Israeli Prime Minister. It reflects decisions made at the highest level, and those decisions have drastic ramifications. When a president acts unilaterally (domestically), without the grounding of Congress or the consent of the governed, and does so in a way that appears driven by impulse, grievance, or personal calculus, we have a problem that goes beyond policy. We have a crisis of leadership. We cannot allow the fate of millions, at home or abroad, to be shaped by the whims of a transactional, narcissistic "leader" who treats institutions, alliances, and human lives as instruments rather than responsibilities.
Your larger point about ethos resonates deeply with me in this moment. On a personal level, we are gathered around tables, eating ice cream, living life with loving family and friends, trying to do some good in the world. On a societal level, we are part of a nation capable of decisions that contradict those very values. That tension between who we are in our daily lives and what is done in our name is not easy to hold, but it is real.
At the college at which I work and in the classes I teach, I see students wrestling with exactly this kind of contradiction. They are trying to figure out what it means to live ethically in a world where good and troubling forces are always intertwined. Moments like this become part of that formation.
So yes, pray, reflect, act where we can. But we also have to speak plainly, as you've done here. There is evil in the world, including in regimes like Iran’s and here in the United States as well. And there are also choices—our choices—that lead to harm to innocents and cannot be reconciled with the values we claim to hold. Holding both truths at once is uncomfortable, but it’s necessary if we’re going to navigate this moment with any integrity.