Cormac McCarthy and the Crucible of Unanswered Questions

In this episode, I reflect on D. Marcel DeCoste’s Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy’s Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment, but I’m not approaching McCarthy from a Catholic confessional perspective. Instead, I’m interested in DeCoste’s insight that McCarthy may raise all the right religious questions without necessarily giving us clear or easy answers. I explore how McCarthy’s darkness, ambiguity, and moral seriousness connect to the crucible of therapy, where people often have to struggle with the question rather than have the answer handed to them too quickly. I also bring in a moment from Apple TV’s Shrinking, where Paul warns against meddling and solving clients’ problems for them, because doing so can rob them of the dignity of their own struggle and discovery.