Author: Andrew Sullivan

For Lee Billings, the author of Five Billion Years Of Solitude: The Search For Life Among The Stars, space exploration offers “the only chance available for life on Earth to somehow escape a final, ultimate planetary and stellar death”:

We really owe our progress and our current state not only to our biology, but also to our planetary resources – to the fossil fuels we burn, the ores we mine, the rich diversity of other species we exploit, and so on. We’re presently using most of those resources in very unsustainable ways. We’ve already plucked all the low-hanging fruit, and much of what we are burning and mining and exploiting now is only available to use through our already sophisticated technology.

So if we somehow drive ourselves extinct, if all our great edifices collapse, I think it would be very difficult if not impossible for anything else to rise up and rebuild to where we are now, even given a half-billion or a billion years. People can and will disagree with me about that, but my position errs on the side of caution, on the side that says humanity’s present moment in the Sun is too valuable to treat as something disposable.

And before the Sun dies out, we will continue to get incredible footage like this:

(Photo: Image of the Earth and Moon taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft from a distance of 61 million miles. By NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)

Timothy George considers the cottage industry of “Hell Houses” – theatrical productions of the underworld designed to terrify congregations into remaining chaste and faithful:

There are many variations on this theme: a hayride through hell, a demon-guided stroll in a cemetery, a train trip of terror, and so on—but all presentations have three things in common. First, there is a series of mini-dramas, gruesome, death-centered tableaux always presented in lurid, edgy (some say cheesy), soap-opera style. These run the gamut from smoking-related cancer deaths to school shootings, teen suicides, fiery car crashes, botched abortions, homosexual teens dying of AIDS, and all kinds of family traumas—domestic violence, divorce, sex abuse (including incest), and the like. The aim of the skit is to show the truth of the New Testament dictum, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), not only physical death in this world, but also eternal punishment in hell in the next.

After the “incidents” come the consequences, namely, a visit to hell. “Hell” is a dark, smoke-filled room complete with strobe lights and the shrieks of tortured souls. The dénouement is a Mel Gibson-esque portrayal of the crucifixion followed by a personal appeal to accept Jesus Christ. Sometimes an actor impersonating Jesus makes the appeal himself in a breath-minted, nose-to-nose encounter with those presumably shaken by what they have seen.

The demand has grown since Jerry Falwell pioneered the idea in the 1970s:

Colorado-based Keenan Roberts has led the way with his publication of a how-to kit for pastors and youth ministers who want to put a little scare-mongering into their teen evangelism program. For several hundred dollars you can buy this resource with directions on how to construct an effective Hell House. There are scripts for seven rooms and instruction on how to present a graphic hell scene and a closing “come to Jesus” scenario. If you want some help putting on a sizzling evangelism event this Halloween, then Roberts’ Hell House Outreach Kit just might be what you are looking for! This kit, available in all fifty states and twenty-six countries around the world, is sold to church leaders who want to “get prayed up and powered up” and “prepared for the ride” of their ministry life. The kit comes with this admonition: Shake your city with the most “in-your-face, high-flyin’, no denyin’, death-defyin’, Satan-be-cryin’, keep-ya-from-fryin’, theatrical stylin’, no holds barred, cutting-edge” evangelism tool of the new millennium!

Reading Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer alongside Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, Will Di Novi finds the book fitting for our own downbeat era:

[The novel’s protagonist] Binx Bolling is at first glance an unusual poster boy for the current depression, an era in which the quest for self-realization might seem an unaffordable luxury. But the search for meaning has never ebbed and flowed according to the fluctuations of the stock market. Millions of Americans led interior, profoundly solitary lives during the bubble years that started the twenty-first century, and they now confront even more acute feelings of dislocation. Binx is a soulful and profane standard-bearer for that disillusionment, “smelling merde from every quarter” of American life. He fails in his half-hearted love affairs. He confounds his family with his disregard for rectitude and tradition. Alienated from both the Old South and the New America, Binx staggers towards the same sobering realization that dogged Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1979. ”We’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,” Carter preached in his speech. “We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

His concluding thoughts on the novel’s enduring lessons:

“Whenever there is a chance of gain there is also a chance of loss,” Binx declares in the frenzied aftermath of a car crash. “Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.” There’s something strangely comforting about Binx’s equanimity, his stoicism in the face of forces beyond his control. Like Binx and his Mad Men contemporaries, unaware of the assassinations and race riots and terrifying hairstyles lurking just around the corner, we have no idea what will emerge out of the seismic changes convulsing our national governments and our global economy. Consider The Moviegoer a signpost in these strange times, a beacon lit by the eternal flames of Percy’s imagination: the alienation and despair that persist in times of plenty and paucity alike; the power of language and humor to still these tremors and give them meaning. The malaise will endure, he warns us. The search will continue.

Ann Friedman believes in not just choosing your friends, but actively courting them:

[M]ost of our courtship narratives are still romantic, which really tends to obscure the importance of friendship’s early stages, and downplay the thought and skill that goes into cultivating meaningful platonic relationships. We tend to second-guess ourselves when we feel that jolt of friend attraction.

A woman I know who recently moved from Houston to Los Angeles was telling me about a woman she met and really wanted to befriend.

“It seems like she has so many friends already though,” said the new girl in town. “Do you think she’d mind if I asked her to hang out?” “You have to ask her!” I said. I have heard many women describe the first time they met a friend and just knew they were destined for years of inside jokes and hang times on the couch and late-night party antics.

“Nearly all friendships are based on a spark of mutual attraction. Some people describe platonic love-at-first-sight stories, wherein they were instantly drawn to a new acquaintance and just knew they would befriend her,” says Carlin Flora, author of Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are. Still, she says, “We often drift into friendships, especially when we’re young and in a work or school setting that makes it easy to automatically ramp things up without having to make a concerted effort to develop the friendship. The main point of my book is that we should be more conscious of how and whom we befriend, since these people have a huge impact on our life trajectories.”