It is [the] mixing of political and ecclesial authority that has led many Christians in the present age to cast significant doubt on the model of church unity built around or tied in any way to political authority. Rodney Stark has argued again and again that the cultural and political establishment of the church historically led to its decline, even if it also manifested organizational unity on the surface. The environment in which the church thrives is always the missionary context where the claims of Christianity engage the claims of diverse religions or diverse cultural settings unprotected by political authority. Whenever the church was given a noncompete clause, so to speak, it lost its vitality.
The biblical account runs against the grain of the contemporary intuition that personal identity is equivalent to the traits of ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, or gender. The web of relationships described in the Scriptures is far richer and more complex than any one of these could encompass. Reducing personal identity to a singular social identity cannot do justice to the complexity of communities to which individuals actually belong, nor to their own individual moral responsibility. These social contexts do provide identity clues, but we should not suppose they exhaust the fullness of our identity. Even more significant, none of these characteristics adequately encompass the fullness of the divine-human relationship at the heart of an accurate description of personal identity.
As “images,” we gain our ontological weight from what we honor, how we find our significance, and where our security lies. In Scripture, people are a thin or thick reality depending on the object of their deepest desires. If their object of desire is the living God, they are filled with life, securing a thick identity. If the objects of their ultimate desires are focused on the created order rather than the Creator, their identity will inevitably be as thin and transient as the objects of their desire. Locating our significance and security in a place or person without ontological ultimacy launches us on a fleeting search for stability precisely where it cannot be found.
Currently reading: The Call by Os Guinness 📚
Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell, making a conservative argument for government regulation of smartphones:
A world in which smartphones are more difficult for children to access, in which burgers and concert tickets are easier to purchase without this device, need not be a big-government dystopia. It is unlikely to come into being, however, without prudent government action. Some problems are simply too widespread, have gained too much momentum, or are too nearly inescapable for individual families, community institutions, or businesses to overcome them on their own. The soft tyranny of the smartphone is one such problem. In these situations, the state’s role is to step in and protect the traditions, institutions, and values of society that new technologies threaten to erode and supplant.
Finished reading: The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry 📚
Didn’t read every single essay (came due at the library), but covered enough to see the broad contours of Berry’s thought. What impressed me most: his deep conviction and clarity of thought.
Wendell Berry, from “Family Work” (1980) [NB: substituting “internet” for “TV” or “television” provides added resonance to our situation]:
We can try to make our homes centers of attention and interest. Getting rid of the TV, we understand, is not just a practical act, but also a symbolical one: we thus turn our backs on the invitation to consume; we shut out the racket of consumption. The ensuing silence is an invitation to our homes, to our own places and lives, to come into being. And we begin to recognize a truth disguised or denied by TV and all that it speaks and stands for: no life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves. These possibilities exist everywhere, in the country or in the city, it makes no difference. All that is necessary is the time and the inner quietness to look for them, the sense to recognize them, and the grace to welcome them. They are now most often lived out in home gardens and kitchens, libraries, and workrooms. But they are beginning to be worked out, too, in little parks, in vacant lots, in neighborhood streets. Where we live is also a place where our interest and our effort can be. But they can’t be there by the means and modes of consumption. If we consume nothing but what we buy, we are living in ‘the economy,’ in ‘television land,’ not at home. It is productivity that rights the balance, and brings us home. Any way at all of joining and using the air and light and weather of your own place—even if it is only a window box, even if it is only an opened window—is a making and a having that you cannot get from TV or government or school.
Wendell Berry, from “Family Work” (1980):
The upbringing we give our children is not just for their childhood but for all their lives. And it is surely the duty of the older generation to be embarrassingly old-fashioned, for the claims of the ‘newness’ of any younger generation are mostly frivolous. The young are born to the human condition more than to their time, and they face mainly the same trials and obligations as their elders have faced.
one could do worse than be a swinger of birches
