An article over at CNN, More Teens Becoming “Fake” Christians, raises news that is alarming but not new.*
According to Princeton Professor Kenda Dean, author of Almost Christian
, American teenagers are embracing what she calls “moralistic therapeutic deism,” looking to God as a divine therapist whose primary function is to make us feel good about ourselves.
She places the blame for this squarely and fairly on parents and pastors. “”Churches don’t give them enough to be passionate about,” she says. And she’s right.
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Oprah and Elizabeth Gilbert discuss Eat, Pray, Love, the subject of a new movie with Julia Robert.
Apparently it’s not just
20-somethings who are self obsessed. It’s everywhere, really, and with the same
root cause. Christine Flowers, for instance, says
Elizabeth Gilbert can “eat, pray, love” all she wants, but she shouldn’t be writing.
In a devastating critique of modern memoirs, Flowers puts Gilbert in the category of “Books by Unexceptional Women Who’ve Deluded Themselves into Thinking That Their Every Thought Is Transcendental.”
And she’s just getting started. She provides examples of “Books by Misfits Who Need to Tell Us How Pathetic They Used to Be but Aren’t Anymore” and “Books by Women Who Dare You to Call Them Sluts.”
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As the school year approaches, we’ve had several college students with us this week, either for dinner or spending the night.
Last night there were six of them sitting on our front porch after supper, sipping tea and talking about things that matter. I like that about our front porch. And I like that about tea. They both encourage meaningful conversation.
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There is a place for civil discourse, but apparently it’s not on the internet. Put differently, if you think politicians are negatives, you should read what their supporters and detractors have to say.
the blessing of work
Photo by MIchael Metts
I’ve been reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
by Alain de Bottom, and the book itself is a joy.
It’s well done literary non-fiction, an exploration of work in ten fields, everything from being an accountant to the manufacturer of cookies.
I can’t begin to do justice to the literary and philosophical texture of these essays, but his style is almost poetic, as when he describes how a supermarket supply chain flies “blood-red strawberries over the Arctic Circle by moonlight, leaving a trail of nitrous oxide across a black and gold sky.”
De Bottom’s purpose is to explore the beauty and occasional horror of work in the modern world. If you read his chapter on cookie (biscuit, since he’s British) manufacture you may never eat snack food again, not because it is unsanitary, but because the process itself is so sterile it has no connection or resonance with home or hearth.
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Posted in books, commentary, culture
Tagged work, de bottom, ecclesiastes