It’s been a busy week for me, and I haven’t gotten a chance to do justice to many of the interesting content I’ve come across. So for your pleasure, here’s some thoughts worthy of your attention:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer takes on technology:
“We do not rule; instead we are ruled. The thing, the world, rules humankind; humankind is a prisoner, a slave, of the world, and its dominion is an illusion. Technology is the power with which the earth seizes hold of humankind and masters it. And because we no longer rule, we lose the ground so that the earth no longer remains our earth, and we become estranged from the earth. The reason why we fail to rule, however, is because we do not know the world as God’s creation and do not accept the dominion we have as God-given but seize hold of it for ourselves…There is no dominion without serving God; in losing the one humankind necessarily loses the other. Without God, without their brothers and sisters, human beings lose the earth.”
Probably every Christian has wondered why Jesus hasn’t yet returned to fix everythin – Why is he so slow, we wonder (2 Peter 3:9)? Theologians ponder why God would allow the Fall to happen in the first place – Why not just create us as we will be in the new heavens and new earth, free from sin and stupidity?
Perhaps the answer is that for God, the process of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration is as significant as the end itself. Of all beings, God himself could certainly have the push-button like experience of instantaneously taking us to the eschaton. But it appears that moving through time and space and doing work of the process of redemption is itself valuable to God. The final union of Christ and his bride is made significant because of the work Christ did leading up to the consummation of all things.
David Sessions says what I said better, and tosses in this gem from Terry Eagleton:
The United States has an exalted image of itself, and would be a far more morally decent place if it did not. A touch of scepticism and self-debunkery would work wonders for its spiritual health. The very impulse which drives it to stand tall and feel good about itself is the one in danger of tearing it apart.
Moving in the other direction, Eagleton takes down–hard–two central strands of post-modernism:
“[Existentialism] was for the most part an ontologically imposing way of saying that one was nineteen, far from home, feeling rather blue, and like a toddler in a play school hadn’t much of a clue as to what was going on. A few decades later this condition persisted among late adolescents, but it was now known as post-structuralism.”
And the redesigned Toqueville Forum promises to have lots of audio goodies, and should be duly noted.