Who ever came up with the term “common sense,” anyway? There are few things less common, unfortunately—especially in politics. During Advent and the Christmas season, you can really see that in the tortured compromises we come up with to let people celebrate. To me, the answer has always seemed obvious: stop trying to censor celebrations, stop trying to censor faith or keep it out of the public square, and just let everybody in. Fortunately for me, Peggy Noonan agrees with me, and she’s made a better case for it than I can.While on the subject of holidays: I ran across an interesting opinion piece from the New York Times on Kwanzaa, written by a woman named Debra J. Dickerson. The piece is titled ” A Case of the Kwanzaa Blues,” and it raises some significant concerns about the holiday, concerns I suspect most people (especially those who haven’t studied much history) haven’t considered. Whatever you might think of Ms. Dickerson’s position, I think her comments deserve careful consideration.
Category Archives: Religion and theology
“There’s too much to do—I’m bored.”
Think that sounds silly? Think again. As Charles Colson notes in one of his BreakPoint commentaries, psychiatrist and theologian Richard Winter has made a compelling case for just that thesis in his book Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment. Here’s Colson quoting and summarizing Winter:
When stimulation comes at us from every side,’ he writes, ‘we reach a point where we cannot respond with much depth to anything. Bombarded with so much that is exciting and demands our attention, we tend to become unable to discriminate and choose from among the many options. The result is that we shut down our attention to everything.’ That is, we get bored.Over-stimulated and bored, we start looking for anything that will give our jaded spirits a lift. Winter says that boredom explains the rise in extreme sports, risk taking, and sexual addiction. ‘The enticements to more exciting things have to get louder to catch our dulled attention,’ he writes.
I think Winter is dead on, but there’s more to be said (which he might well say in his book, for all I know). Speaking theologically, the root sin here is the sin of sloth. Now, we tend to think of sloth as laziness, but there’s more to it; the ancients defined sloth as “the sin of not caring enough about anything.” C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, produced a vivid picture of a person fallen into sloth: “a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off,” because there is nothing that such a person cares about enough to pull them out of such a rut and give zest to life.Sloth, at its peak, is what we know as despair; and if Winter’s analysis is correct—and I believe it is—it’s because sloth has become a major besetting sin of people in our culture. We simply don’t care enough to do the work of engaging the world around us, but we still crave stimulation, and thus we demand stimulation without work; and thus the cycle begins. As to what has created this situation . . . well, I think Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart has done an excellent job of explaining that in his essay “Christ and Nothing.” If you’re up for some serious philosophical reflection, check it out.
“That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
Well, maybe not according to CBS execs back in 1965, when “A Charlie Brown Christmas” first aired; seems they thought it was way too religious—and they didn’t like the jazz, either. Apparently, even though they went ahead and ran it, they planned to bury it afterward. But then people loved it, and it won an Emmy, and so it was back the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that . . .
I can just imagine Lucy’s reaction to those network suits who tried to kill “the longest-running cartoon special known to man” 38 years ago: “You blockheads!”
Another false solution
I’ve had a couple of people recommend Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it (with a three-year-old, a six-week-old, and sermons to write every week, I’m a little behind on time for new fiction—new adult fiction, at least). After running across Sandra Miesel’s evisceration of the book in the September issue of Crisis, however, I think that’s just as well; I still intend to read it, but now I’m aware it won’t be for pleasure. The abuse of history to serve contemporary causes infuriates me, and from Miesel’s analysis, this book is a particularly egregious example of that offense. Clearly, though, that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from buying into its portrayal of history and Christianity.
Another piece worth reading on this book is one Miesel co-wrote with the Catholic theologian Carl E. Olson; this is the first part of what will be a two-part article.
“Evangelism”? What’s that?
Now, this is just sad; but maybe it contains the seeds of hope, too. Apparently, the controversy over Avodat Yisrael, the Messianic Jewish congregation planted recently by Philadelphia Presbytery of the PCUSA, has started Presbyterians thinking about evangelism—many for the first time. According to Leslie Scanlon, the reporter who wrote the piece, “For some Presbyterians, the idea of evangelizing people in the United States—as opposed to China or Africa or Latin America—is sort of a new thought.” As a firm believer in the importance of sharing the gospel, I find that cause for depression. Still, if this is what it takes to start the PCUSA doing evangelism again, if this is what it takes to renew the denomination’s commitment to planting churches (which is the best large-scale evangelistic strategy there is), then so be it.
And as someone with good friends who are Messianic Jews (some of whom are part of the Messianic Jewish community in Jerusalem, which is not an easy place to be), here’s hoping more of them are like Avodat Yisrael—however much flak we take for it.
On Terri Schiavo
Few outside the Presbyterian Church (USA) would be likely to catch this exchange on the Terri Schiavo case, which would be a shame; I’ve come to appreciate both the men involved in this discussion, and their comments here are well worth reading.
One word of warning: Presbyweb.com is a subscription-only site. However, the first month is free, so there’s no real risk. I’d encourage you to check out the site more generally, even if you aren’t Presbyterian, as it is an excellent source of links to news on all Christian denominations, and all other faiths, all around the world. (One good example off today’s page is a Daniel Pipes article on Muslim anti-Semitism; I suspect it will be eye-opening for many.)