Tired of the dominant dating culture? (You know, where people are considered disposable.)
You probably have more company than you realize.
It seems that the lives of so many are careening out of control, and broken relationships often play a part.
Some of my thoughts on this are found in the attached video presentation. A rosy future is more likely when not wearing rose-colored glasses. Let’s (re)think this.
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
After the military defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the extent of the atrocities there became clear. Many millions of people had been executed, including several million Jews. The genocide of the Jews became known as the “Holocaust,” and many resolved that it should never happen again.
This was and is a noble sentiment, but the fact is that the mass extermination of people, including genocide, has happened many times since 1945. One thinks of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s, the mass killing of Cambodians by Pol Pot in the 1970s, and the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s, among others.
Recent events demonstrate that the genocidal spirit is still “alive and well.” Ukrainian civilians have been intentionally targeted by Vladimir Putin, and the terrorist organization Hamas recently carried out racially motivated attacks against Israelis. A world in which mass killings will never again happen has not materialized, and indeed recent history demonstrates that the killing goes on again and again. Human nature has not changed since the Fall.
We should pray for and desire institutions, leaders, and political arrangements that provide a check on people’s worst instincts, knowing that a perfect world will always elude us. Only God can change the human heart.
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
The subject line has been used in various contexts to grab people’s attention. What is knowable—and what is not—has been the subject of philosophical discussion seemingly forever. I am reminded of Woody Allen’s quip: “Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?”
At a more mundane level, people are inclined to plead ignorance of certain truths when it suits their purpose, maybe even demanding “proof” of something without specifying what kind of proof would be sufficient. But I believe that people know much more than they let on or are willing to live up to. Consider the following examples and their implications:
-Everyone is going to die—and we all know that—but this is not something we want to acknowledge. This becomes a serious problem when we live on a day-to-day basis as if we will never die or think that death is so far off as to be somehow irrelevant.
-We know deep down that human life is special, in a way that other life forms are not. We might feel bad about stepping on a bug or running over a squirrel on the road, but we know that those things are qualitatively different than squashing a human being. But do our attitudes, actions, and laws necessarily reflect the value of human life?
-Everyone recognizes that no one is perfect. We even have a phrase for this: human nature, which is typically used in reference to shortcomings inherent in all of humanity rather than any “goodness” it possesses. So much finger pointing and posturing, whether in the public square or the private realm, is simply hypocrisy.
-We all want to be treated in accordance with the Golden Rule and know that it is morally preferable to selfishness. Indeed, we object when we are treated badly. The Golden Rule is almost universally acknowledged but is not universally practiced, for reasons of convenience.
The disconnect between what we know to be true and how we live is the cause of much unhappiness and injustice.
A poll by the Wall Street Journal/NORC (U. of Chicago) has quantified what many have sensed for some time now: religion, patriotism, and having children are much less important to Americans than they used to be (https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/253962/religion-patriotism-and-having-children-diminish-in-importance-for-americans-wsj-poll).
Only 39% of Americans say that religion is very important to them (down from 62% in 1998). Similar results were found for the questions of having children and patriotism. Although being religious, wanting children, and being patriotic are not one and the same, it is easy to imagine how someone disconnected from God’s love would find it harder to love one’s country or want to make the effort to raise children. Secularism is the soil in which all sorts of selfish impulses thrive.
What these latest findings portend for the country is not pleasant to think about. America’s second president, John Adams, though himself not a trinitarian Christian, famously observed that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” What would our nation and its government look like without a “moral and religious people”? We may soon find out, and indeed warning signs are already here.
Over the centuries, America has been a melting pot of nationalities, cultures, and even ideas. Recently, the secularist mindset in America has become increasingly intolerant of anything and anyone espousing contrary opinions. Agreeing to disagree is no longer viewed by many as a reasonable response to disagreement, with some form of punishment being preferred, such as loss of employment, physical violence, or social ostracization (“cancelling”). This is an unwelcome development for the body politic, and increasing strife seems likely.
It is tempting to believe that we can turn things around by doing the right things, saying the right things, or praying the right prayer. But there is no guarantee of success in this undertaking, if success is understood to mean a massive cultural and spiritual reversal in the near term. Consider the example of Jesus of Nazareth during Holy Week—the perfect witness to God’s Kingdom, who did, said, and prayed all the right things but was still rejected by the crowd.
As we stand opposed to the Western World’s decline and offer Christianity as the countercultural antidote, perhaps we would do well to not discourage ourselves by fixating on the decline but rather to focus on reaching one person at a time, viewing that as success in its own right. As the saying goes, think globally, but act locally.
Photo by Corinna Lichtenberg from Pixabay
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said celebrating Advent means being able to wait (“Advent feiern heißt warten können”) and that important things are worth waiting for. A pastor from my youth suggested that it should be a time of preparation, leading to a changed life that would only be evident in retrospect. He suggested that the proper response to the question “Did you have a good Christmas?” would be: “Ask me a year from now,” when it will be possible to look back more objectively. Indeed, Ted Olsen observed: “Like the Lenten season before Easter, Advent was once a [time of] solemn preparation…” (https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/2008/august/happy-advent.html)
How much waiting, preparation, and time can be involved in God’s timetable? I was reminded recently that Isaiah, who foretold the coming of Jesus, preceded him by 800 years. (To put that in perspective, consider that the Pilgrims celebrated Thanksgiving “just” 400 years ago.) And now it has been 2000 years since Jesus walked the earth.
So, let’s make the most of the next few weeks.
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel;
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Is technology improving relationships? With each passing year, it becomes more difficult to make the case that it is. The landline telephone made it possible to stay in touch with distant friends and relatives (and spared people from running errands), which were widely viewed as good things. Television was more of a mixed blessing. More so than radio, it tended to preoccupy the viewer, since both of the dominant senses were involved; as a result, communication with family often got crowded out. (“Not now! I’m watching TV!”) Years ago, I first saw something that I found jarring at the time: a couple was out for a stroll, but each one was talking into their own cell phone. (Presumably they were talking telephonically to other people, not to each other.) Since then, phones have gotten “smart” (i.e., visual, with lots of information), so now you can be preoccupied on the phone without even speaking to someone.
The Internet and its related electronic devices have taken the user’s level of engagement to another level. It can be reasonably said that preoccupation has given way to addiction. In the January 2022 issue of IEEE Spectrum (“AI’s real worst-case scenarios”; https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9676367), Natasha Bajema observes how smartphones and the algorithms behind them work to “steal our attention away from our jobs, families and friends, responsibilities, and even our hobbies. To make matters worse, the content often makes us feel miserable and worse off than before.”
Her characterization rings true: stealing our attention from what matters, like friends and families. What are the long-term implications of such technology? What will our society look like when a generation of children grows up having been robbed of meaningful time with other family members? Even more sobering is the prospect of that robbed generation raising their own kids, without having first experienced a proper family life for themselves. What will become of their kids?
It’s incumbent on each of us to make wise choices in how we spend our time. I once heard a pastor make the point by stating the obvious: “When you come to the end of your life, it will be spent. Everyone spends their life somehow.” It’s become too easy to spend your life in a virtual world, instead of the real one.
Photo by Ihor OINUA on Unsplash
War represents a breakdown in relationships, when rational discourse is no longer welcomed. It stands in contrast to the hope and renewal associated with Easter.
War—on a scale the world hasn’t experienced in years—is all over the news and grips the senses. Winston Churchill, no stranger to war himself, famously remarked that “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Not much is left to the imagination anymore, now that soldiers can record carnage and report it on social media.
Beyond the violence, war confronts us with fundamental God-related matters such as life and death, what really counts, what really lasts, and right and wrong. We are confronted at the moral level especially when atrocities are committed, but war itself is always an atrocity that can be laid at the feet of someone or some group.
When tyranny raises its head, we should oppose it and support freedom. My prayer and hope are that the forces of evil will be defeated, those guilty of it will be brought to justice in this world (as well as the next), and the affected peoples and nations will one day be reconciled.
Image by Jeff Jacobs from Pixabay
Writing in the 1950s, William Cole lamented the cultural tendency to view couples as separate from the larger community and offered the following corrective: “The inescapably interpersonal character of all life is a note the Bible strikes again and again, from the Old Testament stress on the family and its demands, the community and its concerns, to the New Testament assertion that ‘we are members one of another.’” (Sex and Love in the Bible, Association Press, 1959) Indeed, in the opening chapters of the Bible we read that it is not good for man to be alone, and the concepts of family and community quickly follow.
Central to the human experience are relationships, both with God and with other people, and these are on full display at Christmas. We have in the manger a poignant picture of God becoming man, thereby anchoring the Creator to His highest created being and announcing a relationship between the two that will last forever. We also see in the manger scene a relationship between child and parents. This was the beginning of an earthly nuclear family, and siblings of Jesus would soon join him in that family.
His life as an adult can’t be fully appreciated apart from many other relationships: his interactions with commoners, the elites of the day, and a government that would become complicit in his death. All of these played a role in building the Kingdom of God, which is nothing if it does not include relationships between people—and between people and God.
Merry Christmas.
Everything in our society is now viewed as disposable, not just things we buy: relationships and all manner of people when they are no longer desirable or “useful” to us, such as former romantic prospects, persons nearing the end of their life, and unwanted children, including the unborn. The legal relationship between government, the unborn, and the women who carry them was brought into the national spotlight by the Supreme Court in 1973 and once again is a leading topic of conversation, now that this body has decided to revisit the issue.
The number and role of crisis pregnancy centers have grown in the intervening years, out of a desire to give women an alternative to abortion. I recently had the opportunity to attend a conference with several dozen pregnancy center directors, virtually all of whom were women—you could count the number of men there on one hand. I don’t think men are indifferent to this issue; I imagine that many of them are involved in other ways, like writing checks. But in a curious sort of way the saying about abortion being just a “woman’s issue” was brought to mind. That characterization never struck me as fair: Yes, a woman does “carry the child,” but men contribute half of the genetic material and about half of those aborted are male. Nevertheless, I wonder if the woman’s greater nurturing instinct might contribute to the disparity in the gender ratio I observed.
One thing at the conference that struck me is how much effort goes into a crisis pregnancy center. There is much more to it than running pregnancy tests and handing out brochures. There are government requirements related to building codes and medical clinics, employment and staffing issues, insurance considerations, and ongoing fundraising.
I should write another check soon.
Image from Pixabay
In his article titled “First comes love, then come house keys” (Christianity Today, April 2021), David Ayers documents the increasing acceptance of cohabitation among self-professing evangelical Christians (see https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/april/cohabitation-dilemma-comes-for-american-pastors-ayers.html). It was less than a century ago that the average American believed that cohabitation before marriage was wrong, a view that was retained by a strong majority of American Christians until much more recently. As the article documents, however, many if not most self-professing evangelical Christians in America are now ambivalent on this subject.
In my experience, when an individual compromises on this issue, leaving the Church for good usually follows, unless one’s moral compass is set straight. It is surprising that this attitude has become so widespread among professing Christians and deeply troubling that this has happened with the relative acquiescence (silence) of the Church. None of this bodes well for her future, as the witness of the Church will continue to be diluted. Nor does it bode well for the future of marriage, which is already under attack from many directions, including divorce.
Jesus never promised us that being his disciple would be “easy.” Pastors and parishioners can do the right thing by articulating a Biblical view of marriage and sex that elevates unconditional love over selfishness—and live accordingly—or take the “easy” route by remaining silent to avoid giving offense.