a deeper magic is needed
In a small effort to broaden my understanding of this cultural moment, I’ve been listening to new voices. The Wall Street Journal, Christianity Today and the Free Press often have a different angle on what’s happening than The NY Times, the Washington Post and Christian Century. I’ve appreciated hearing new voices, if for no other reason than they help clarify my own thinking and opinions. Even so, I remain baffled by those who pledge allegiance to the President and the party for which he stands. But listening to new voices gives me some insight into my own errors and especially my naïveté. Along these same lines, a couple of years ago I began reading the magazine, Comment, whose byline is “Public Theology for the Common Good.”
They describe themselves this way: “Comment is seeking to be an agent of social renewal in our time, an aspiration grounded in historical precedent (small magazines have often played a pivotal role in shaping the context within which leaders and intellectuals think and make decisions), and an aspiration grounded in Christian hope: our moral imagination seeks to create a world, not destroy the one we have. Our work builds on the four historic projects of Christian humanism: a theological project, a virtue-formation project, a civic- and political-economy project, and an aesthetic project.”
In the current issue, Anne Snyder, Editor-in-Chief, in an essay titled “Rooted Yet Awake”, reflects on the role of the individual in time when “the crowd” is so persistently shaping the individual for the sake of the crowd. She writes, “we like to “discern” just enough to pick a side, but rarely do we dwell in the gray long enough to remain attuned to new realities that might call into question where we’ve chosen to settle. … We’ve grown fluent in the ways and means of achievement, but strikingly inarticulate about the hungers beneath.”
[When the crowd is so dominant] How do you awaken the heart and educate the spirit? She continues: “It’s a risky question to ask in a Reformed-inflected, upper-middlebrow journal. But it’s time. There is no shortage of intelligence today—whether human or machine. We see more college degrees walking around than at any other point in human history, and brilliance in the form of new discoveries, inventions, and sharp analysis abound.
But wise people, those who taste truth before it’s trending, who can name evil without mirroring it, who forgo fashionable opinions for a deeper attunement to the Holy Spirit and to the human person—such people are rare. Sometimes, it seems, increasingly so.
There is a rumbling afoot that our world is entering an uncharted age, what I might call a hybrid age, one where the technofuture that is assured and the medieval enchantment that is reawakening collide in unpredictable, quite possibly wild ways. If this is true, and I think there’s something to it, rational formulas are just not going to cut it. A deeper magic will be needed. (A reference familiar to readers on Narnia.) A new language will be needed. (A reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.) Artists and prophets will be needed. Women, frankly, will be needed.
It is our own destiny in the sight of God—not the crowd’s—that we want you to explore. For we are all—each one of us—responsible to choose wise paths. Our capacity to do so may be diminished by laxity on our part or intimidations beyond, but the responsibility remains. Stay rooted. And please also stay awake.
Owls are, for many, a symbol of wisdom. This is a Great Gray Owl whose gaze in Minnesota remains imprinted on my mind.