Over the years I’ve used the season of Lent as a sort of laboratory for experiments with truth. Perhaps that’s not the most properly penitential way to go about these 40 days of fasting, which should be more outwardly directed than inwardly, calling us out of ourselves to service, repentance, giving, and recognition of our own fragile contingency.

My experiment this year was going vegan—eating no animal products at all, whenever possible. And this isn’t the first time. I did it also one Lent a few years ago along with several of my then-housemates, all of different faiths. That time, for me, it was difficult. Of all things, I couldn’t stop missing cottage cheese and probably splurged like crazy when Easter came.

This year couldn’t have been more different. I never once missed not being able to gobble down a slice of pizza or guzzle a glass of milk. A few baked goods with eggs in them might have been tempting, but that’s as far as it went. In fact, I loved being vegan. I’m not quite attentive enough to my body to know the difference in that regard (so brainwashed with Platonic-Pauline flesh-hating as I must be by now). But in my heart, I suppose you would have to call it, it gladdened me enormously not to be consuming the produce of other creatures. Closer, eating felt, to the hope of living nonviolently in the world.

The difference, undoubtedly, was all in the preparation leading up to this Lent. First, of course, was the not-so-subtle nudging from my mother over the preceding few months. For nutritional reasons above all, she has taken dairy out of her diet and has been rather evangelical about the idea. Intellectually, the nutritional reasons don’t do much for me, but more subconsciously, maternal pressure does wonders.

Along with that came some conversations with my former UCSB colleague Aaron Gross, a remarkable scholar and activist. For the Brooklyn Rail, I covered the launch event for his organization, Farm Forward, which is working to end factory farming. Aaron brought to my attention the deep moral and ecological bankruptcy of the animal farming industry—even to the point that the infrastructure no longer exists for truly sustainable practices at a large scale if someone wanted to try them.

Trailing on that, then, came more conversations with my friend Bryan, a fellow writer and passionate environmentalist. While my tendency is always to come at difficult social problems with novel, Yankee-ingenuity approaches, he puts his trust in simplicity and restraint. Not enough people today are willing to recognize, as Bryan does, that technology will not save us until we save ourselves. The upshot of his attitude is: we have to treasure the things we need and happily put aside the things we don’t. For him, this is less a matter of personal discipline than plain sense.

Comparing this year to the last time makes me realize how much preparation matters. It made the difference between 40 days of exhausting torture and 40 days of happy sacrifice. Actually, preparation is what Lent itself is all about—building ourselves in anticipation of the resurrection at Easter, ensuring we can experience, as fully as possible, its meaning. To those who would say that people are nothing but gut-level, instinct-processing machines, this Lent gave me an answer. Yes, perhaps we are gut-level, instinct-processing machines, but we are also much more. What we learn, think, and discuss matters enormously. Through these, guts and instincts can be calibrated and satisfied—not even necessarily through some dualist super-mind from outside, but by the resources our desires themselves have at the ready. The desire for compassion happened to have been built up strong enough by my friends, in this case, to overcome the desire for cheese.

Lent is over, and I guess I’ll be going back to my usual leniency: most-of-the-time vegetarianism, though this time with most-of-the-time veganism added on too. If there’s one thing I’d like to share about this experience, it goes to those who, when I said I was going vegan, said, “Oh, I could never do that.” Yes, you can, and a zillion other things. We can change the way we live, together and with the planet. It just takes preparation.

A conversation about it with Jeff Sharlet today made me think I should explain the role of theological imagery in my little songs a bit—not that they should be taken too, too seriously. Obviously, these days, Christian music is in a pretty terrible rut. The task, as I see it, is to combine heartfelt piety with honest uncertainty. “God Saved the World” begins with the words, “Some say…” in order to cast the only certainty about theology into sociology. That doesn’t mean they’re any less real or true, and I sing them with conviction. And then the theology is practicable. After the instrumental interlude, verses about Bible stories give way to stories about worldly things, though clothed in the same tropes of creation and salvation. I am grateful for those tropes because they give me the language to speak of two aspects of worldly life: love is the first, then the act of growing up into oneself.

I don’t know what to say about the cows. They happened to be who I encountered on the road to visit my friend Brother Benedict.

And sorry about the lousy quality. I filmed it on my tiny digital photo camera.

We’d like to do a lot more audio and video over at KtB, so if you’ve got any good stuff somehow related to religion lying around, send it along to us. Writing, of course, is always welcome too!

What its leading lights envision is something at once quaint, radical, and practical: end the practice of factory farming that makes misery for animals and pollution for the planet on an enormous scale. They want to encourage a gentler, more sustainable kind of animal agriculture, one carried out by family farmers who live on their land and take pride in their animals. And they’ve got help.

In the article I explore the sensation of being around do-gooding celebrities, what they can do for animals, what Farm Forward means for the animal welfare movement.

I’ve been actually quite inspired by Aaron’s work—both his advocacy at Farm Forward and his scholarship in the religious studies department of UC Santa Barbara, where we met. Conversations with him and with Bryan Farrell, who joined me at the event, have actually been leaning me toward a very modest inclination to veganism. Well, to be honest, the people really pushing me there are my mother and uncle. Stay tuned (perhaps for a long time) for their fantastic upcoming cookbook. If there’s any desire, maybe I’ll start posting recipes from it on the blog! Let me know.

Forgive me if one way or another I misread her paper—hearing a talk one time through without having the printed text makes it difficult to catch the details, which in this case, are very rich. I will invite Professor Nussbaum to read this and correct my memory as she likes.

Nussabaum’s starting point comes from the dean of popular ethology today, the author of several fascinating books on ape behavior, Frans de Waal. Among humans, he has proposed the concept of “anthropodenial” thusly: “a blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves.” Nussbaum’s paper reflects on the consequences of such anthropodenial in human societies. She speaks of the ways in which the desire to purify the humanity in ourselves results in casting other people as animals. Certain habits of masculinity, for instance, perfect themselves by trying to transfer all the animality they sense in themselves onto women. In the process of striving to be fully and solely human, men make women into vessels of their vestigial animal, in particular through sexuality. The same strategies, she argues, apply to racial categories as well. Animalizing others makes it possible to abandon compassion for them. To make this point, Nussbaum skillfully analyzes some rather macabre examples from literature and recent genocidal history.

Her answer, then, is that to repair the brokenness of human compassion, which allows us to be unmoved by the suffering of others, we must embrace the animality in ourselves. When we abandon the project of purifying our own humanness at the expense of all resemblance to animal others, we cannot hide from compassion so easily. (Nussbaum didn’t address at all the work of Giorgio Agamben on human/animal distinctions or his concept of “bare life,” though the similarities were at times striking to me.)

Nussbaum’s point is a powerful one, and it raises challenging questions for the most well-meaning humanitarian ethics, not to mention the most ruthless tribalisms. But throughout, the paper continually appeared not quite able to follow its own call. While she explicitly rejects the traditional “ladder of nature” with animal at the bottom and human at the top, for instance, she cannot quite do away with it herself. In her discussion of what we share with animal emotions, she speaks of apes and mice as essentially less-developed versions of humans. Who can blame her? Whether you choose to adopt the hierarchical model explicitly or not, such comparisons will inevitably have hierarchical subtext, since, for humans, humanness will always be the paramount point of reference. Then, at the very end, Nussbaum describes her entire project in terms of “restraint”—the purpose is to restrain ourselves from doing evil. Yet, earlier, she implied that restraint would be an act unique to humans (since only we “have a robust conception of fault and no-fault” that would make restraint a possibility in the first place). Therefore, her conclusion appeared (at some level at least) to contradict the entire thrust of her talk: calling us to compassionate restraint amounts to a call to perfect our humanity at the expense of animality, the very thing that permits us lapses in compassion.

I do not point to this as an error in her reasoning so much as the arrival at an honest impossibility. We can no more welcome our animality fully than we can purify our humanity. Being human means inhabiting a circumstance that is different from other animals, just as being a bat would be also. One might even imagine, if humans are in fact fully animals, what better way to be an animal than to carry one’s humanness to its most uniquely human extremes?

I would, therefore, want to carry Nussbaum’s important point a bit further. Rejecting crass anthropodenial is only the first step of an ongoing habit. There are times, in fact, when a certain anthropodenial is just what we need. Compassion (which she rightly points out is related to but not exclusively bound to empathy), I argue, depends on an ongoing practice of dexterity with one’s own identity. There are a whole sequence of identities I can claim—carnally-born, animal, human, American, male, Catholic, Jewish, atheist, right-handed, leftist, Virginian, New Yorker, and so on. Living compassionately means wading among them all, arriving at none finally but all of them resolutely. Thankfully, each can represent a resource for compassion, for seeing others as bound up in myself. But each should also, at some level, be a brake on compassion, a place to draw the line where a degree of self-concern can be allowed to prevail.