Time & Perspective Quote by Cole Younger

A wanted man claiming a "natural inclination" toward theology is the kind of line that tries to launder a life. Cole Younger - Confederate guerrilla turned bank-robbing celebrity turned prison-era memoirist - isn’t just sharing a hobby. He’s staging a conversion narrative that nineteenth-century America was primed to reward: the sinner who discovers God behind bars, the outlaw who emerges as a moral specimen fit for polite attention.

The phrasing does the heavy lifting. "Occupy much of my time" sounds disciplined, almost vocational, as if study itself is penance. It reframes incarceration not as punishment but as a monastic schedule - a place where the mind can be redeemed even if the body is confined. Then comes the slyest move: "for which I have a natural inclination". Natural. Not newly acquired. Not performed. He’s suggesting theology isn’t a desperate late-life repair job; it’s the real him, the version that circumstances and war supposedly distorted. That’s a bid for legitimacy, not just forgiveness.

The subtext is transactional. In the post-Civil War moral economy, public repentance could soften a sentence, sell a memoir, secure a lecture circuit, and rebrand notoriety as hard-won wisdom. Younger’s line also smuggles in an argument about agency: if his inclination was always there, then violence becomes a detour, not a destination. Theology, in this telling, isn’t escape from consequence; it’s a claim to authorship over his own myth.