Author: Andrew Sullivan

“Union with God is not something we acquire by technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God. Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of separation is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition. The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word. This illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us this is what normal is, and we are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation (our consumer-driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it). But some of us are not so good at coping, so we drink ourselves into oblivion or cut or burn ourselves ‘so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside.’

The grace of salvation, the grace of Christian wholeness that flowers in silence, dispels this illusion of separation. For when the mind is brought to stillness, and all our strategies of acquisition have dropped, a deeper truth presents itself: we are and have always been one with God and we are all one in God,” – Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land.

(Hat tip: Richard Beck)

Two-thirds of Evangelicals aren’t fans of Darwin’s work (pdf):

Karl Giberson reflects on his experience teaching evolution at an evangelical college:

For a quarter century I taught scientific theories of origins—evolution and the Big Bang Theory—under a cloud of suspicion that waxed and waned but never totally disappeared. With few exceptions, my mostly evangelical students accepted these ideas. I took informal polls indicating that most of the 50 percent of my students who rejected evolution at the beginning of my course accepted it by the end. My colleagues at other evangelical colleges report similar experiences. We were hopeful that these evangelical students would become leaders of their faith communities and gradually persuade their fellow evangelicals that evolution was not a lie from hell—which was what many of them had been taught in Sunday school. But instead scientifically informed young evangelicals became so alienated from their home churches that they walked away, taking their enlightenment with them.

An alarming study by the Barna group looked at the mass exodus of 20-somethings from evangelicalism and discovered that one of the major sources of discontent was the perception that “Christianity was antagonistic to science.” Anti-evolution, and general suspicion of science, has become such a significant part of the evangelical identity that many people feel compelled to choose one or the other. Many of my most talented former students no longer attend any church, and some have completely abandoned their faith traditions.

The debate has been percolating again recently. Gregory Wolfe goes one more round, defending his thesis that faith hasn’t disappeared from the literary landscape, but writers are handling religious themes with more nuance and reserve than before.  He does, however, admit one bit of nostalgia, looking back with envy at the Christian public intellectuals who helped “to mediate what is going on in the arts to a broader audience”:

If I miss anything from that mid-twentieth-century period, it is the presence of thinkers like Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, and Thomas Merton, who were equally at home in the New York Times and Commonweal. Their rich, humanistic sensibilities are sorely missed. What happened in the intervening decades is a steady shrinking of cultural and aesthetic concerns to ideological politics, including church politics. What happened was the progressive dumbing down and crudeness of what has been called the culture wars. In the relentless pursuit of partisan politics, the endless fight against heresy or entrenched orthodoxy, Left or Right, the religious community’s arteries have hardened. As [Dana] Gioia observed, “What absorbs the Catholic intellectual media is politics, conducted mostly in secular terms—a dreary battle of right versus left for the soul of the American Church.” The actual blood of everyday human experience—the stuff that art and literature capture, in all their ambiguity and resistance to ideological programs—is not circulating very well to the body’s limbs.

TNC had an epiphany while reading books about WWII and its aftermath:

[Tony Judt’s] Postwar, and the early pages of [Timothy Snyder’s] Bloodlands, have revealed a truth to me: I am an atheist. (I have recently realized this.) I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don’t even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely. I don’t know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.

I’m also not a cynic. I think that those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us.

Or perhaps not. Maybe the very myths I decry are necessary for that work. I don’t know. But history is a brawny refutation for that religion brings morality. And I now feel myself more historian than journalist.

In the comments section, he clarifies his position:

 It is not my contention that religion causes immorality, but that it isn’t an actual barrier against it.

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Joe Berkowitz introduces the short film seen above, Noah, which premiered this week at the Toronto Film Festival:

The 17-minute, mildly NSFW Noah is unlike anything you’ve seen before in a movie–only because it is exactly like what many of us see on our computers all the time. Created by Canadian film students Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg, the film begins when our high school senior protagonist types in the password that opens up his laptop, and the narrative takes place entirely on his computer screen.

From the desktop photo of a young couple posing for the camera, we learn that Noah has a girlfriend. Their relationship serves as the centerpiece of this cautionary tale about digital culture. Through Noah’s perspective, we see the way the couple communicates, either in Facebook chat or Skype, with him flitting through any number of other online activities at the same time, while approximating being present for their conversation. Things really get interesting, however, when our protagonist hacks into his girlfriend’s Facebook account. The rest of the film deals with the fallout from this act.