A digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.
The Poison We Pick
Andrew Sullivan
More than 2 million Americans are hooked on some kind of opioid, be it heroin, morphine, fentanyl, or a multitude of other related drugs. The past decade has seen a quantum leap in opioid use and related deaths in America, with more lives lost in 2017 than in the entire Vietnam War.
How did this crisis happen so fast? The best answers take the long view. What draws all opioids together is their relationship to the poppy, a flower that has been used as a numbing agent in America since the earliest days of the nation when Thomas Jefferson planted them in his Monticello garden. The poppy has a unique draw on Americans — and its growth mirrors the history of the nation itself.
This brilliant and illuminating article by Andrew Sullivan is essential reading for understanding the landscape of the American opioid epidemic today.
Read "The Poison We Pick" (New York Magazine). For a book-length treatment of the American opioid crisis, check out Sam Quinones' Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opioid Epidemic.
Cruciform Love
Rankin Wilbourne
It’s one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person. … In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: "And how are you crazy?"
So begins an article by Alain de Botton entitled “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person”, The New York Times’ most read article of 2016. De Botton insists that we in the modern world are saddled with an unrealistic “romantic view” of love which fails to see that “every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them.”
Rankin Wilbourne uses this article as a launch pad for a searing exploration of 1 Corinthians 13, the Bible’s greatest hymn to love. Often heard at weddings and wrapped in the trappings of "romantic love", Wilbourne insists that Paul's words are a schooling in love intent on showing us how little we understand the greatest of all virtues, but also helping us to see the cross-shaped love of Jesus as the truest and most realistic measure of real love.
Listen to "Cruciform Love" (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). For more from Rankin Wilbourne, check out his book Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God.
The Dangers of Distracted Parenting
Erika Christakis
Erika Christakis is a mother of three and, like many parents these days, she’s heard a lot about the dangers of too much screen time for kids. But what if we should be more concerned about parental screen usage?
Statistics show that mothers today spend a higher quantity of time caring for their children than in previous generations, but Christakis is convinced that this interaction is of increasingly low quality. “Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned,” she writes, largely owing to the constant presence of digital distractions.
Christakis marshals some surprising statistics about childhood development and safety, but she concludes by noting that though occasional parental inattention has been part of parenting forever (just read Little House on the Prairie), parenting in our time is characterized more by continuous partial attention. How might this affect the way children interpret, receive, and respond to love from their parents?
Read “The Dangers of Distracted Parenting” (The Atlantic). For more on the problem of continuous partial attention, see Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
Andy is trying to keep non-comestibles out of his 10-month-old's mouth and is trying to use books to become a better parent (Janet Lansbury's No Bad Kids and John Gottman's Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child). He is also having several email conversations with friends about the pros and cons of the Enneagram prompted by last week's admission that he is reading Chris Heuertz's The Sacred Enneagram. Join the discussion at threethingsnewsletter@gmail.com.
Phillip returned yesterday from a Labor Day journey to Michigan where he and Christa started listening to Michael Pollan's ultra-intriguing new book on LSD and magic mushrooms called How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Don't worry: they were just listening.