Three essays, one old word read three times
Good Protocols, SPC · Paul Tan · September 2026
These three essays were written for people in the middle of hard seasons, and they were written in a particular posture, which the painter Makoto Fujimura named culture care, as against culture war. The difference is simple to state and hard to live. Culture war fights over the field. Culture care tends the soil until the field is simply, undeniably, fruitful. Nothing in this volume argues anyone into a position. Everything in it is set down in the open, described as honestly as I know how, and left for whoever finds it useful.
The essays share an architecture that only became visible after they were written. The first, My Name Is Not Legion, sits with mercy. It is for families in the diagnosis years, when a young person is carrying a mental health crisis, a significant neurodivergence, or a behavior at the edge of clinical intervention, and the family’s story has started being told for it by voices that are many. It ends with a name handed back and a man sent home. The second, The Kindness That Is Strong Enough, sits with kindness. It is for a culture that has grown tired of fighting, and it describes the room, the circle sturdy enough to hold young people the world argues about without handing down a verdict on any of them. The third, Letting Kids Play, sits with play. It is for the parent in the middle of it, and it describes the field, the ordinary seasons where a child’s becoming gets its time.
Mercy is the door. Kindness is the room. Play is the field the room opens onto. Underneath all three runs one old Hebrew word, hesed, which English never managed to translate with a single word, so our Bibles render it mercy in one verse and kindness in the next, and lose entirely its third face, the love that stays. Mercy looks back and meets what has already happened. Kindness looks forward and gives the returned name room to become someone. The staying holds through the seasons the becoming actually takes. These essays are one word, read three times.
They can be read in any order, and each stands alone, but they were built in this one, and a reader who walks the door, the room, and the field in sequence will feel them lean on each other. One line from the first essay should be carried into all three, and I will state it here so it is never more than a page away: when safety is in question, nothing in this volume counsels waiting; you call the clinician and you go. Everywhere short of that line, these essays counsel the slower clock.
A word about the voices in these pages. Thinkers appear here the way colleagues appear in a workshop, because they are doing work, not because they are being cited. Some readers will know them and some will not, and the essays are built to hold either reader. The notes at the back of the volume gather the apparatus, the version histories, and the contributions still under evaluation, so that the essays themselves can travel light.
The three essays are offered whole and left in the open, in the manner the posture requires. Nothing in them is a position to be adopted. Each is a room, described as honestly as I know how, for whoever finds it useful to stand in.
The three, in the order they were built
- My Name Is Not Legion · the door · for families in the diagnosis years · sits with mercy
- The Kindness That Is Strong Enough · the room · for a culture that has grown tired of fighting · sits with kindness
- Letting Kids Play · the field · for the parent in the middle of it · sits with play
They can be read in any order, and each stands alone. A reader who walks the door, the room, and the field in sequence will feel them lean on each other.
Notes
The essays travel light, and the apparatus lives here. The Legion essay’s scriptural readings rest on Mark 5:1 to 20 in the English Standard Version, lightly adapted, read with William L. Lane’s and R. T. France’s commentaries; its cost accounting rests on Mullainathan and Shafir’s Scarcity and Hal Hershfield’s future-self research; its longer arc on Barry Prizant, Temple Grandin, Daniel Siegel, Becky Kennedy, and Henri Nouwen, with George Nakashima’s Minidoka years as its lived proof. The Kindness essay thinks alongside Makoto Fujimura, Johann Hari, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, and Iris Murdoch. Letting Kids Play thinks alongside Robert Putnam, Becky Kennedy, James Krenov, and the prophet Zechariah. The full footnote apparatus for the first essay is available on request and travels with the standalone edition.
Good Protocols, SPC · Culture Care in Hard Places: Three Essays · combined volume, revised September 2026