A Gentle Rebuttal to "The Right Has Forgotten Feelings"
A response to Freya India's First Things essay
The girls are not alright
During the past week, I have been attempting some spiritual reading, as it is after all Lent, and Easter—that holiest of holies for the Christian, is fast approaching. Part of my goal with my essays is to reach a deeper understanding of what is happening in the culture, both secular and religious—in the discussions both high-minded and low-browed, as I make my way through this life. Today, I want to look at
’s new piece at First Things on how conservatives have lost their ability to feel, but more like, Christians and Conservatives have lost the ability to message to today’s modern Gen Z woman.As a young woman in my 20s, my view of the dating culture was simply to navigate it—first, among secular men and trying to find a gentleman who believed in fidelity and marriage, without all the religious Christian “nonsense” I had been so against and raised by my parents and American culture to scoff at. Later, I realized that engaging in the Carrie Bradshaw-esque world of dating, casual sex, and the like, I did not want that world and the heartache of being ghosted, or having someone who was comfortable and wanted to play house, instead of actually making a home. This was difficult for me, as my parents cohabitated and foreswore getting married again, after each having a dead-end marriage that resulted in they or their first spouses leaving. Because of this “enlightened” example of relationships, I believed that I too could go into the world with the casual-sex, “act like a man view” and found that I was not built in that way at all. My experiences were few, but perhaps due to being a Highly Sensitive person, or because I had a neglectful father, I found I attached and caught feels too easily.
When expressing sorrow, I found that the women around me were dismissive or harsh, that I only needed to keep sleeping around, keep trying it on, keep doing as they and the rest of the culture encouraged and reinforced. My individual experience, confusion, pain, and sorrow did not matter. As is often the case, if one brings up an uncomfortable alternative of experience that was not positive, all conversation is ended and shutdown with “Well that didn’t happen to me” or “That wasn’t my experience,” or “You didn’t xyz enough”, which shows little compassion or interest in encountering the vulnerability that has been presented. What mattered was unyielding adherence and enforcement of the current cultural norms. The greatest pushback came from women older than me—often in Gen X, more often in the Boomers, who came of age during the sexual revolution. My experiences were outliers and anathema to these women. It became apparent there was no sympathy or empathy, and the underlying message was to simply shut up.
But then women like
, , and released books, essays, and articles, reporting that the girls were not alright. Cracks had begun to show. The Washington Post wrote an article circa 2017-2018 about the experiences of college girls who had never experienced an orgasm, despite rampant participation in hookup culture. I was not alone in my hurt, anger, and isolation about intimate dating relationships. But my view, taken from the experience of men in my own Millenial age group, was not mainstream. It first started with , who released a bit around 2021 here on Substack that there was going to be a rise in secular celibacy and matchmaking, as people were unsatisfied with the dating world.The cracks have been showing for a long time, and it has finally started to enter a wider level of mainstream culture outside of Christian circles, who’ve been speaking on this subject for a decade at least. India’s comments is that the current messaging has left her and other young women cold, ostracizing, shaming, and humiliating them for poor choices while feeling bereft and left outside of the “welcoming” nature of the church.
Her charge that the church is not compassionate enough is a good point. I will not deign to condescend that India is not an intelligent woman; she is aware and has good insight, especially for a woman of her age with regards to her generation. Prescient insight I have found, is substantially rare among most people, regardless of age. Too many are caught up in anesthetizing themselves or hiding the truths they don’t want to face to recognize much about themselves, or others. It is a rare gift.
It sounds, from her writing, that she has begun to dip her toes into the realm of attending church and a nascent flirtation or exploration of Christianity. The church certainly has her people full of foibles. As we are called to love others, we remember that the body of Christ’s church is complex and multi-layered, full of both truly holy, saintly people, and others who imperfectly clamor and prattle like ringing gongs. There are the genuine and disingenuous, and these types are found in every institution, religion, and culture. Again, we are a large diverse body, and the intricacies of church politics and policies are myriad legions. Entire libraries can be dedicated to doctrine. Not all Christians are warm and welcoming, but the thing to remember is that regardless of the hardness, softness, saintliness or mediocrity of the Christian, our God is an all powerful one who makes events and choices, no matter how sinful or pure and good, toward his end to bring us into the light of his kingdom. After all, diamonds are made under pressure, and ore must be mined, cleaned, and purified in a forge to reveal its dazzling properties.
None of us who starts off Christian starts off perfectly, see St. Paul for a primer, or St. Peter, who betrayed Christ as the cock crowed three times. How awkward was that first meeting in the upstairs room when everyone realized they had betrayed the man they swore passionate love and fealty to?
I converted to Catholicism and was welcomed in the church in March of 2016—what a tumultuous year. From my own experience, being open to God and hearing the gentle whisperings of the Holy Spirit, of Christ, of our Heavenly Father—that conversion took years. It took 14 years, from 2009 to 2023. It was not an overnight process, and it was excruciatingly painful and difficult. To Ms. India and many others considering exploration and conversion, understand, the process may take longer than initially realized. I’m going to try and respond to what India wrote with some thoughts related to this Lenten season that I think will help clarify my position.
An Imperfect Institution and Stoic Fangirling
The church is an institution first created by Christ that has been helmed, guided, lead astray, and lead back numerous times over the course of her 2,000 plus year history, by characters heroic, patient, and downright sinister and selfish (see the reigns of the anti-popes and the clerical abuse of indulgences for prime examples). As an older adult, though not as old as I someday hope to be, it has taken me a long damn time to realize that people are as foolish, petty, wicked, and selfish as our forebears written about in Kings, Judges, the rest of the Old Testament and the New Testament. We would all have been the rabble condemning Christ, busy with our work in a crowded marketplace as a bruised and beaten man carrying a cross post staggered through the dust and heat. Welcome to the fall and original sin y’all.
Part of the issue here is culture, but as, I think,
aptly put it in his own piece back from October 2024, you can’t have a Christian culture. The problem lies in a confusion for what women turning left are seeking, and what the conservative and Christian right are reacting to and seeking, and it is a system that they can form to themselves to provide structure, stability, and a safehaven from the confusion, fear, and uncertainty of our present times.Well if you wan’t that, then Christianity is not what you should be seeking. I mean, as a Christian, yes it is, but the attitude is seeking the fruits of Christianity, rather than seeking the wellspring that those fruits came from, and that is Jesus Christ.
Much of the Christian rhetoric has been heavily influenced by stoicism. I say this not because this is my insight, but because I am relying on the bountiful conversations my husband and I have often about the failings of our church and the people in it, not from a condemnatory place, but one of trying to make sense, again, of what we are witnessing. Young men today in the Roman Catholic churches around as are seeking solace in something solid, real, grounded. Yhe same for the Catholics and secular converts who convert to Orthodox faiths as a bulwark. The same for the cultural Christians who fall into a Conservative camp, though their theology is as deep as a puddle often. Sometimes, as I think is happening, it is because they become too rigidly attached to a system because it makes them feel safe and secure, and desiring that is not a terrible thing. But as Father Jaques Felipe expresses in his book “Searching for and Maintaining Peace”, we can want something that is good and is good for us, but the desire isn’t articulated in a pure way. Our wanting of it—whether it be stability, peace, security, forgiveness, love—can be so strong that our passion becomes so great and impatient that we want it in a way that disrupts our interior peace and isn’t good for us, because we want it to come to us the wrong way for the wrong reasons. I hope that made sense.
I applaud Freya India for searching out the ways of Christ, and would say to her that her search for meaning in a direction that she was never personally or culturally exposed to or encouraged toward, is a wonderful fruit of the spirit. We live in tumultuous times, and she is being called, gently, by the whisperings of the most gentle yet passionate and ardent lovers: Christ. We are all made in the Imago Dei, in the image of God, and have in us not only the spark of life, but the inherent dignity that comes with being one of his children. As Chesterton tells us, to paraphrase badly, just because God makes daffodils, it doesn’t mean that each daffodil doesn’t delight God. He loves each new one as much as the last and never ceases to delight in making them.
The current church and cultural conversation has been invaded by a hard form of stoicism (my husband’s take, I love you, thank you). It is attractive because it takes a firm stand on “issues”, it gives set boundaries for how to behave and how and what to value, which is appealing. It gives structure. It states, this, this is where we plant our flag, firmly in the shifting tides of sand . But without love, truth is simply harsh and cold. With only love, we are never corrected and flail in failings that we think are strengths, behaviors that undo us and lead us to unhappy situations or ends. We must have compassion as Freya India calls it, within the church to welcome others.
She asks Conservatives to listen. I’ll paraphrase the article in a quote, and my answer is always the true answer, for those with eyes to see, but those blind and still reaching through the dark will not like it. Emphasis is mine.
Besides forgetting how to speak about feelings, the right has forgotten how to listen. Christians wonder why young women aren’t going to church, and conservatives ask where all the good women have gone, but I don’t see much listening. Not sincerely. Few try to understand what young women might be searching for in therapy culture, finding in liberal feminism, hearing from the left—what needs are being met that aren’t met elsewhere. Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary? Don’t we see that many young women haven’t “abandoned” faith, haven’t turned their backs on the sacred, but were born into a world already desecrated? That they haven’t forgotten their worth but were never taught it?
…
Listen to young women long enough, you will often hear pain. They might be brave enough to ask you: Do you know how it feels? How it feels to hold on to hopes of love and loyalty in a world of Tinder and hook-ups? How it feels to be reserved and conservative in a world that punishes those qualities, makes you feel pathetic and frigid and childlike?
…
How it feels to dream of romance, only to grow up and find it dead? That disappointment? I can’t begin to tell you.
…
But Christians and conservatives can say something different. In a world that denies and confuses young women’s every instinct, show them another way. In a culture that tells them to detach and harden their hearts, show them that it’s okay to attach, that it’s human to depend; that their desire to put other people first should be treasured, not trained out of them. In a world that gives girls no guidance on love, no rules for relationships, give them examples and expectations. In a world that measures their worth by filters and editing apps and “likes” on a screen, give them deep, divine, unconditional love. In a world where nothing is permanent, where no vows can be expected to last, give them institutions, commandments, a world that takes commitment seriously, a world of the timeless and eternal. In a world that demands compassion without anywhere to direct it, give them community, somewhere to call home. In a world where girls are left to make up their own morality, where all they get are empty platitudes to love themselves, give them right and wrong. Give them a way of life that meets their instinctive needs and doesn’t make them feel anxious or insecure or needy. Give them answers.
But Freya is perhaps new to this world.
As I said, the church is a human institution, instituted for us and run imperfectly at times. These charges she makes are fair, but the other way is there. This is where is where the language may be archaic. How do people, who have never farmed or grown anything, understand the logic of the parable of the mustard seed? Of the fig tree? Of pruning and cutting, if their realm exists in a sanitary digital cage of algorithms, 1s and 0s, of fiber optics and flashing lights and projections on a screen?
As she says, to requote, “Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary? Don’t we see that many young women haven’t “abandoned” faith, haven’t turned their backs on the sacred, but were born into a world already desecrated?”
The world has always been fallen. This isn’t a new revelation since the digital age; we have always existed in various times of strife, struggle, agony. The thing to remember is that while we fight battles here on earth, our ultimate goal is not this world, but the next. It is to join the multitudes of souls that Mrs. Turpin witnesses in Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation” and be welcomed into the beatific vision, the vision of heaven so beautiful that St. Thomas Aquinas stated made all his life’s work “like straw”.
The church does teach these things. It isn’t clear if India is attending an Anglican parish or something else, but these examples do exist. In the nonprofits of Catholic brothers and nuns working tirelessly to feed the poor and educate children, the homeless and halfway houses in various cities around America, if not the world. Deep, divine unconditional love exists in the grace given by the Father:
John 3:16. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
Life eternal in heaven. To die in a way so brutal, bearing the weight of all the sin of every human being ever alive, on a cross, in three hours after being nailed, after being stripped naked and whipped with a cat of nine tails, blood and strips of flesh trailing in the dirt as he walked to Golgotha. A supernatural love.
Some of our institutions are failing, some not, but the commandments are there, and have been for more than 2,000 years, since Moses came down from Mount Horeb.
There is a right and a wrong. There is a way of life that sustains. It has existed and continues to exist.
If Christians and conservatives care about reaching young women, really reaching them, their mission must be to heal their troubled hearts, to still their racing minds, to mend their broken trust. Now is the time to rekindle their dimmed and darkened worlds, remind them of forgotten dreams, listen to what they have kept to themselves for so long, comfort and console. Show them that in these old-fashioned things they have only ever heard scorned, only ever seen mocked, only ever thought of as oppressive and, above all, heartless, there is much that’s worth holding on to.
In this, she is right. Conversion was made more difficult by the flawed congregants I encountered on my way to the cross, to my own crucifixion. Men and women who still immaturely attended as perfunctory, or, to my working-class chagrin and origins, had never known starvation, poverty, abuse, neglect, and were hard-hearted or lacked comprehension and understanding. Not all were like this, but a life of leisure and comfort, married with intellectual Catholicism does not a saint make. The preachy platitudes of the “Conservative” Christians turn me away, but I’ve had 14 years of practicing, badly at times, as a Catholic to realize that many people are just broken, and still need time to mature and develop in their worldview as well as their spiritual lives. It takes time. The earth still groans in her labor pains, still groans under the weight of billions suffering. There is and never will be a perfect community or church.
But we aren’t expected to do it alone, and cannot. That is where God’s grace comes in, for Christ himself is the great physician and is to whom we turn for healing, not a doctrine or a building. Christ.
This Age is a Spiritual Dessert
We are called to Christ, and to love, certainly. But within that love, we are called to transform and be transfigured by the figure of Christ. This means allowing the old sins, beliefs, desires, and wants that frustrate our progression to transfiguration to die away. We do not call God on our terms—Thou shalt not test the Lord thy God, right? We also don’t make an idol of Christ’s teachings and the fruits of Christianity over 2,000 years as something to worship or assume we must have in order to be sustained. Christ lives in us and sustains us, through his body and blood.
I have another post around Christianity that is a discussion of Paul Kingsnorth and another Christian writer rebutting him here on Substack coming out soon, but the point is, Christ is not a system. His teachings are not an idol, as I said. They are good because they are what has been laid out by God the Father, who’s wisdom and understanding is not our own, according to our own human foibles and failings. I mean, logically, God is omniscient and we aren’t, and he has access to the fullness of time and everything, since He created it, and we don’t. And for that, I am particularly glad. Events and actions often play out in ways that I could not have begun to predict, and I often realize, especially grudgingly, that a greater good than I could have conceived of comes about because of those events transpiring. Difficult as it is to admit, going through terrible dating relationships and several painfully intense bouts of spiritual warfare, as well as a difficult childhood and being one of those 58 million people during Covid who lost their job and found it neigh impossible to find steady work for a few years, those dessert periods were extraordinary in teaching me how much I, and all of us, rely on and need God.
And that is what I think this period of time is, socially and culturally.
We are living in a dessert time, but for those who don’t have the language of the dessert fathers and Christianity, that phrase doesn’t mean much. I will relay a story.
Mother Theresa is considered a great saint, though I know a priest who met her and found her irritating and annoying. Such actually, is not an uncommon view of the saints. They often have some pretty strong foibles that people don’t always discuss, because, they were human, and imperfect. Mother Theresa didn’t really speak about it during her lifetime, but she experienced a spiritual depression and despair for 40 years. At various points in our religious and spiritual life, you may feel the presence of God, of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, and it fills you with peace, warmth, a quiet, radiant joy that fills your heart. For her, she felt none of that, just an unending despair, for four decades, every time she tried to reach out to the Lord. She didn’t know why. Then one day, she had an epiphany. As she sat gazing at Christ hanging from the cross, an act of pure love that baffles people (How can you view such a thing as an act of Love? It is truly a mystery), she either heard the voice of Christ (what we call interlocution) or had a thought. It was this: I thirst. It was not strictly his need for his thirst to be quenched, as the Roman soldiers attempted to remedy when giving him likely drugged posca (a vinegar drink derived from wine), but that he thirsts for us, for our love.
India’s words convey a longing, not only from and for herself, but from her generation, from all generations, to feel loved, to feel safe, and especially as a woman, to feel pursued because of her beauty and goodness. We all desire this. We desire (according to Cory Asbury)
The overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God
Oh, it chases me down, fights 'til I'm found, leaves the ninety-nine
I couldn't earn it, and I don't deserve it, still, You give Yourself away
Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God
The stoicism, that hard, firm, stand-in-the-sand set of principles is enticing and attractive. It gives us something firm to hold onto in a world full of chaos where love is rejected, fidelity is scoffed at, and human life and every facet of it is commodified and commercialized for a profit that dehumanizes us, our feelings, and experiences as just another commercial product. It is not a wonder many feel adrift and lost, when so few facets of society herald good, true, beautiful, virtuous things.
But we must also remember that conservativism and liberalism are both personality based traits, if you’re familiar with psychology. Some of this is genetic to an extent—both are evolutionary adaptive patterns. One is to conserve and preserve, and the other is a force to create and renew. One is stability, and the other is a protection against ossification. You need both for there to be stability so that one does not overtake the other. But let me be clear: Christ is not conservative, liberal, libertarian, a communist, or a capitalist. He is none of those things; to say so is to place labels on someone who transcends those things, for his teachings do not fit neatly into any of our postmodern categories for conceptualizing systems, and historically, none of those terms were a thing back then. Fealty and feudalism are more fitting, since the Old and New Testaments talk about kings, lords, servants, masters.
The loss of compassion
I kept thinking about the many young women I know who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart. Who is this meant to persuade? The people the message is supposedly for aren’t even in the room. Those who actually need help will not be reached by theological lectures on marriage or family. What they need right now is someone to give expression to the wound of growing up between two homes, someone who dares to talk about the pain.
No one wants to be lectured. But we live in a postmodern world where correcting your children is seen as a social sin, rather than a social necessity for not letting them grow up into little beasts who throw tantrums, are entitled, and are selfish and inconsiderate.
Shame is a good emotion, public shame is not something we want to engage in. Much of the conversation details shaming women (and men) for their choices. But that isn’t compassion. The message is, yes, you are a sinner like me, like us all. But this hinges on us coming fully to Christ as we are and being willing to be transformed and opened to God’s will and love for us. Again, his wisdom is not our own. We cannot be transformed unless we ask for his grace to work in us; it requires our consent and free will.
The women India notes have learned to self-sooth and be self-reliant, certainly a product for American’s and of the West for the times, one of independence and autonomy. For a society where at least two-thirds of the present generation comes from a broken home, a stat India cited in a previous post, it’s not a wonder that so many men and women are afraid of a relationship because they’ve never seen one last. It also stands to reason, that as the father sets the example and understanding for conceptualizing a loving father in God, if your earthly one wasn’t, it might be hard to reconcile that the number one deity cares about you and that you can reliably be vulnerable and dependent on him.
We as members of the church must be compassionate. I mentioned that shame is a good emotion, so bear with me. Shame, guilt, remorse, and regret are all different emotions from one another. They are corrective emotions. We experience them for various reasons so that we may learn from whatever experience or mistake we have made so that we don’t make the same error in judgement or mistake twice. Not for us to dwell on and beat ourselves up; God doesn’t desire us to be masochistic and enjoy the exercise, for there are certainly people who do enjoy wallowing. It’s a disservice to your purpose and gifts. But we as members of the church have to be compassionate. Fr. Jacque Felipe made another point in his book that bears some reflection. How can we, as Christians, welcoming new converts in, be hard hearted, when we ourselves have likely engaged in many of the same behaviors we condemn? We don’t want to extol those behaviors and say they’re alright, because they aren’t. This is the challenge of every Christian: to hold up the standard gently while also welcoming and offering compassion and love without being hard. It is on the heart of the convert to also be softened as well, also a grace from God.
For those coming to the church, it also requires letting go of attitudes or beliefs that are not helpful, like an addict going back to a drug of choice and engaging in other self-destructive behaviors that get in the way of healing. It requires meeting in the middle and patience, on both sides.
But the generational gap is so stark between Gen Z and younger, and their elders. Even the gap between myself and Freya India, who’s about 10ish years younger, is striking. I have a bit more in common with my 42-year-old Gen X friend than the women five years younger. We struggle to grapple with what they grapple with, especially those who remember a more analog age when so much of real life happened in real life, rather than virtually, where so much of culture now transpires.
The church needs men and women who have converted from these kinds of lifestyles that present Gen Z women are raging against to step up and say “Yes, I was there where you are. I suffered. There is a better way. You have to let go, and I accept you as my sister/brother as a new creation in Christ.” Many could even see themselves in the story of St. Mary of Edessa, an innocent woman seduced by a priest who became a prostitute in her shame, and was later rescued by her monk uncle, reverting to a life of prayer and chastity. We have all been the woman at the well. Christ knew what she had done; who and what she had been. Yet he loved her anyway.
Having respect for stoicism is not in and of itself bad; it’s not a bad system, especially for men who, if you believe in evolutionary theory, need to have their emotions buttoned up and locked away in order to defend the tribe from saber toothed tigers and other predatory humans who want to steal their grain stores, pillage what little they’ve accumulated, and rape their women and children.
But remember what I said earlier? We can want a good thing that can have good ends for us in a way that isn’t good. And that is what the issue of stoicism is and the hard-heartedness of these people who “speak” for the church and at church talks and conservative gatherings is. It is another form of purity culture and pharisaical thinking. It is reactionary.
“We must be a bulwark against these extraordinary times, so we must double down” but it is not done for love, and it is not done in the name of Christ. Christ didn’t shame the woman at the well. He was firm and correcting, but he was not unkind.
We as members of the church must remember what it was like to be in the position of these young women. More than a fair share of young men and women in the church have experienced someone who lead them along and defrauded them into thinking that a relationship was to be had, only to be ghosted, or met with immature blaming and contempt, self-centeredness or hard-hearted attitudes. Perhaps they were like me, men and women who became part of the world, rather than just in it, seduced by the promise of love and connection through the false thinking that casual sex would lead to something more, if only we could secure that other person without really testing or trusting them.
The culture is painfully difficult to resist. No doubt about that. Many of us will get sucked into the lies it tells us will make us happy. But, the lessons that India talks about are ones that we must all struggle through as those actions we’ve taken and are ashamed of are examined, forgiven in ourselves, and let go. This process of reflection is done again and again until we reach a point of shedding. Those weights will be set down and when we are unencumbered from shame and guilt, we are left with remorse, then regret, and eventually, the memory becomes only a memory, tinged with a little sadness. And someday, perhaps, those Tinder hookups, that dissatisfying situationship, may be a source of joy. It is difficult to see that in the now, while one is still wounded, hurt, lost, and weary. The boyfriend who abused me in college, the selfish jerks I dated, those were all painful wounds. They took years, 14 years, to be healed.
Faith is the hardest cross
I didn’t believe that I could trust in the goodness of my husband, but God’s wisdom is not mine. My husband was the answer to many years of painful yearning and prayer. I prayed for a good man, a kind man, an unselfish man, who was in every way unlike my earthly father. And God answered, in his time, not mine. Those wounds were healed, in his time. I had to be ready to be open to being loved by a devout Catholic man, who walked the walk as much as he talked and prayed “the talk”. God’s grace came down upon me over those 14 years that I might be healed, in slow starts and fits to be honest, and I had to work with his grace to be healed. My husband also had to be open to being healed by God. You see, I was against ever getting married to someone who had been divorced. In a true twist of God’s sense of humor, my husband had been married and divorced, and received an annulment. It was because of that experience and those long years in the desert, for both of us, that we were able to be transfigured to a point to be ready for marriage.
We got there through self-reflection and self-work, and yes, with some therapy. But also striving to have a deep connection to Christ through prayer and continued pursuit of the sacraments.
We will continue to convert and be converted, to be transfigured to more closely resemble Christ, through the sanctity of our marriage, for the rest of our lives.
Conversion is a slow process. For these women seeking something deep, abiding, and true, they’re going to have to trust in a God they aren’t sure of and let those elements of themselves die away. Unless God grants the grace, the process takes time. You can’t force a baby to walk; he has to learn to roll over on both sides, slither perhaps, then crawl, then sit up, pull himself up, cruise, and finally, take his first unsteady steps. There is no rushing the process of healing and conversion, a radical concept in a fast-paced GIVE IT TO ME NOW kind of world.
Perhaps for Freya India and the millions of women in the Gen Z and Millenial generation, these anxieties and woes are their crucifixion. Perhaps, these are the things that must die—anxieties and fears that overwhelm, distance, and place them at length from the God so passionately pursuing her, and them, by any means possible.
Pax Christi
This story was updated for grammar, spelling, and additional clarification of various points 4/5/25.