I think both S&S and Senator Hawley chose the road of escalation. A small step in the grand scheme of things, but a step nonetheless.
Continue readingPosts Tagged → Ross Douthat
Their emulation of Jesus proved fatally incomplete …
Here their emulation of Jesus proved fatally incomplete. In their quest to be inclusive and tolerant and up-to-date, the accommodationists imitated his scandalously comprehensive love, while ignoring his scandalously comprehensive judgement. They used his friendship with prostitutes as an excuse to ignore his explicit condemnation of fornication and divorce. They turned his disdain for the religious authorities of his day and his fondness for tax collectors and Roman soldiers into a thin excuse for privileging the secular realm over the sacred. While recognizing his willingness to dine with outcasts and converse with nonbelievers, they de-emphasized the crucial fact that he had done so in order to heal them and convert them-ridding the leper of his sickness, telling the Samaritans that soon they would worship in spirit and truth, urging the women taken in adultery to go, and from now on sin no more.
Given the climate of the 1960s and ’70s, these choices were understandable. But the more the accommodationists emptied Christianity of anything that might offend the sensibilities of a changing country, the more they lost any sense that what they were engaged in really mattered, or was really, truly true.
— Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
Their emulation of Jesus proved fatally incomplete …
Here their emulation of Jesus proved fatally incomplete. In their quest to be inclusive and tolerant and up-to-date, the accommodationists imitated his scandalously comprehensive love, while ignoring his scandalously comprehensive judgement. They used his friendship with prostitutes as an excuse to ignore his explicit condemnation of fornication and divorce. They turned his disdain for the religious authorities of his day and his fondness for tax collectors and Roman soldiers into a thin excuse for privileging the secular realm over the sacred. While recognizing his willingness to dine with outcasts and converse with nonbelievers, they de-emphasized the crucial fact that he had done so in order to heal them and convert them-ridding the leper of his sickness, telling the Samaritans that soon they would worship in spirit and truth, urging the women taken in adultery to go, and from now on sin no more.
Given the climate of the 1960s and ’70s, these choices were understandable. But the more the accommodationists emptied Christianity of anything that might offend the sensibilities of a changing country, the more they lost any sense that what they were engaged in really mattered, or was really, truly true.
— Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
Ross Douthat on Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
This week’s edition of Coffee & Markets features New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and a discussion of American religion and its impact on public life. Listen here.
