A digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.
America's New Religions
Andrew Sullivan
“Everyone has a religion," writes Andrew Sullivan. "It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.
We live in a secular culture in which politics is increasingly occupying the meaning-vacuum left by religion. As Sullivan explains, “if your ultimate meaning is derived from religion, you have less need of deriving it from politics or ideology or trusting entirely in a single, secular leader. ... The need for meaning hasn’t gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction. And religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults.”
In Sullivan’s view, there are two prominent political cults vying for the religious affections of Americans in 2019: the cult of Trump and the cult of social justice. Whether you’re on the left or on the right, these cults “are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.”
Read “America’s New Religions” for one of the clearest summations available of the American cultural moment. For Sullivan’s take on the UK situation, check out his recent longform piece on the remarkable similarities between Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn.
3 Great Untruths to Stop Telling Our Kids – and Ourselves
Jonathan Haidt
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is convinced that three great untruths have been woven into the fabric of American parenting in the last generation:
The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
The result? Kids born in the mid to late 1990s — the generation known as iGen — have been unwittingly infantilized, emotionalized, and tribalized by their parents. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are on the rise. Safe spaces are in high demand on university campuses, which have become hives of continual protest against contrarian ideas and speech perceived as threatening.
Listen to Haidt talk about the three great untruths, their wide ranging effects, and how we might resist them in the following short videos:
You can read more in Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's new book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
The Tech-Wise Family Challenge
Starting January 7
Our glowing screens form and shape our relationships with one another. This is especially true in the home. How might we navigate family technology use in a way that binds us together rather than drives us apart?
In The Tech-Wise Family, Andy Crouch insists that the answer is not to get rid of technology, but to put technology in its proper place. We do this not with potentially legalistic, negative rules for sheltering our homes from tech, but with positive commitments like these:
We want to create more than we consume. So we fill the center of our home with things that reward skill and active engagement.
We are designed for a rhythm of work and rest. So one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year, we turn off our devices and worship, feast, play and rest together.
We wake up before our devices do, and they “go to bed” before we do.
As Andy Crouch says, “It’s not (just) about screens. It’s not (just) about limits. And it’s definitely not (just) about the kids!”
Curious for more? Sign up to join The Tech-Wise Family Challenge starting January 7. It all starts with a webcast with Andy Crouch and his daughter Amy Crouch. After that, you’ll receive a daily email with a suggested reading from The Tech-Wise Family, a daily action, and family discussion questions.
Since becoming a father, Andy has noticed an interesting trend around his middle which he has dubbed "dad fat." It is the result of a seemingly inexorable, belt-enlarging cocktail of lack of sleep, lack of time, and emotional food coping. Luckily, Andy moonlights as a game designer and has created a game in which his friends can challenge each other to do things like exercise and read books. His first challenge was to read Lesslie Newbigin's Proper Confidence, which he heartily recommends.
Phillip recently returned from a Christmas road trip where he started reading Russell Moore's The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home aloud to Christa in the car. This proved a struggle due to both laughter and tears. It's a beautiful book that pulls no punches. He's also burning through Alan Jacobs' The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in the Age of Crisis, his birthday present to himself.