There is a longing in nationalist ritual that bespeaks a desire for communion that is at the heart of Christian liturgy. Patriotic liturgies have succeeded in imagining communities because Christian liturgies have failed to do so in a fully public way. […]
If the Christian liturgy is to reclaim its centrality to the imagination of a redeemed world, we must look with a critical eye on liturgies that compete for our allegiance. We must not quarantine the liturgy into a “sacred” space, but must allow it to shape the way we form our mundane communities, our goals, allegiances, purchases, and relationships.
We get an extra hour of sleep tonight as well, right?
Globalization cannot simply aim at a borderless world, and in fact the rhetoric of borderlessness is deceptive. Transnational corporations are not really transnational, for almost all are based in the West. The utopia of limitless and borderless consumption is offered to those who can pay, primarily Westerners of the middle class and above. The globalized economy, like tourism, depends on the maintenance of a center and a periphery….The progress of modernity depends on the instability of modern identity and the conviction that reality and authenticity are elsewhere. The conquering spirit of globalism—the attempt to turn every other place and thing on the globe into a potentially consumable experience—depends ironically on the maintenance of bordered identities, the preservation of premodern authenticity. The primary boundary, then, that globalization must constantly reinforce is the boundary between the modern and the premodern, the developed and the undeveloped. […]
Globalism has tended to reinforce divisive borders, especially those between the developed and the undeveloped. The cosmopolitan gaze of the tourist seeks to connect with others, but ends up vacating their otherness, and thus destroying the connection. The pilgrim, on the other hand, sees all as potential brothers and sisters on a common journey to God. The pilgrim preserves otherness precisely by not seeking otherness for its own sake, but moving toward a common center to which an infinite variety of itineraries is possible. If God, the Wholly Other, is at the center, and not the great Western Ego, then there can be room for genuine otherness among human beings. The pilgrim church is therefore able simultaneously to announce and dramatize the full universality of communion with God, a truly global vision of reconciliation of all people, without thereby evacuating difference.
Aaron Renn made a splash recently with a tweet, subsequently expanded into a Substack post, in which he explained the importance of choosing the right ‘status hierarchies’ to climb in life and acknowledged some of his poor decisions on this front earlier in his career. (Critical, though charitable, responses to Renn can be found here and here.) I found the original tweet unsavory and couldn’t manage more than a quick skim of the longer post. In my limited interaction with his work, my sense is that Renn is (at least in some ways) a perceptive interpreter of culture and, yet, I find his vision of the world deeply uncompelling.
In reading the tweet, my mind quickly went to a post @ayjay wrote on his blog a while back that, not coincidentally, begins as a polemic against Renn’s “negative world” thesis. But, after rejecting the sort of “strategic thinking” approach employed by Renn and others, Jacobs narrates his own rather circuitous career path. As he explains, his vocational trajectory has not been pre-meditated; there isn’t some grand strategy or plan to work at elite academic institutions or write for the most respected outlets. Instead, Alan has made certain commitments along the way and then has allowed providence to direct his steps and open (or shut, as the case may be) doors along the way. No to strategies; yes to commitments. (And yes to sprawl.)
It’s instructive to see these two writers describe the twists and turns of their respective career paths and, more to the point, to hear the lessons they’ve both drawn from those experiences. I know which path seems more appealing to me.
The church’s confession of sin can become a kind of resignation to the inevitability of sin, the constancy of the “not yet,” which requires, with a fated and regretful sigh, that we take up the sword again to restrain sin with sin. When the acknowledgement of our sin circles back to a tragic view of the world, our humility becomes demonic. A true understanding of eschatology requires neither tragic resignation to sin nor a triumphal declaration that the church is the realized eschaton. It requires a fully penitential “overaccepting” of human finitude and sinfulness by receiving the healing kingdom that God, through Christ and the Spirit, has planted right in the midst of our bloodstained history. The recognition of our sinfulness becomes not recognition of our tragic fate but a humble acknowledgement that we are not in charge of making history come out right by violent means. Our fate has been transformed into our destiny, which is to receive the kingdom of God in humility and thankfulness. The city of God is not the shape of our triumph, but of our repentance.
The American nation-state has found its solution to the problem of pluralism in devotion to the nation itself. The nation-state is made stronger by the absence of shared ends, and the absence indeed of any rational basis on which to argue about ends. In the absence of shared ends, devotion to the nation-state as the end in itself becomes ever more urgent. The nation-state needs the constant crisis of pluralism in order to enact the unum. Indeed, the constant threat of disorder is crucial to any state that defines its indispensability in terms of the security it offers. Pluralism will always be a crisis for the liberal state, and the solution to the crisis of pluralism is to rally around the nation-state, the locus of a mystical communion that rescues us from the conflicts of civil society. Though the American consensus as a natural law tradition of reasoning is dead,…another kind of American consensus is alive and well. It is the consensus that America is, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, “the indispensable nation.”
