Leadingchurch.com

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/05/the-rise-of-the-anti-culture

HT: Dreher

Anti-culture followup 

In assessing the nature of that “coin” Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn has put it well, “… the therapeutic sensibility [has replaced] justice with personal liberation – defined as pursuit of impulse, thus distorting politics by making people either overly political, aiming only at exertion of self interest through power, or apolitical, leaving the polity devoid of a binding public philosophy. In the absence of transcendent principle, … like the push for civil rights for African Americans…, all of social life, from the private to the political, becomes a sphere for self interested manipulation.” Clinton and Trump are merely different manifestations of this therapeutic culture, in which we are all at least partially complicit.

Cultures endure when their institutions embody common understandings of the good, that are all the more powerful for being implicit. There are perpetuated by certain forms of life in community, that have the power to bind and shape us far beyond mere argument. In this sense it is not the words of a written constitution written on paper, but the sentiments of an unwritten constitution written on the heart that matter most. The ascendance of the Clinton/Trump Hydra is prima facie evidence of the deformation of that unwritten constitution, and the emergence of an anti-culture.

http://quillette.com/2016/05/02/purity-and-tolerance-the-contradictory-morality-of-college-campuses/

Increasingly college students throughout the United States complain of perceived slights they call microaggressions, they demand safe spaces where they can be protected from harmful ideas, and they ask for trigger warnings to alert them to course material that might cause discomfort. We have argued that these are all manifestations of victimhood culture — a morality in which people display a high sensitivity to slight, handle conflicts by appealing to authorities, and seek to portray themselves as weak and in need of help. Older moral injunctions to ignore minor and unintentional offenses get cast aside, and those who successfully identify as victims or allies of victims gain a kind of moral status.

Christianity Today

Washington Post

“Something came over me, I think the Lord came to me, and he just said get in the truck and leave,” Shupetold an ABC affiliate. “And when I got in my truck, you know, I was so proud, because I felt like I finally drew a line in the sand and stood up for what I believed.”

Books and Culture

But let’s take Dietrich at his words, however vague, just for now. If you unravel the argumentative thread of Excellent Beauty, it reads as follows: A) All religions require belief in some transcendent reality; B) Since science can’t prove the existence of a “transcendent reality” this is really no reality; C) Therefore, the religious should embrace a strict materialism, the reality that science reveals there to be; D) However, since the material world still contains some inexplicable mysteries—the “excellent beauties”—we must acknowledge that even science has limits; E) Accepting these limits and unknowns will temper both science and religion, ushering in a utopian new science (religion?) that will give all the wonder and worship and community of traditional religion without all the nasty genocide and bigotry and hubris.

One can’t help but imagine that Augustine, Anselm, Calvin, Descartes, Pascal, Rowan Williams, and a host of orthodox Christians would pronounce a collective “amen” at Dietrich’s assertion that the mysteries of the natural world all “point” to (at a minimum) some supernatural “something” responsible for it all, even as they noted that he was thereby contradicting his own premises. As if he were half-aware of the contradiction, Dietrich adds that these “mysteries” reveal something rather chilling: “The excellent beauties challenge the idea that the universe in which we live is a place for humans”—that is, a place designed for us. And while it seems that perhaps Dietrich’s “new” science is opening up pathways to a much older “religion” or, as he frames it, a less divisive and violent religion, there is almost nothing in his account of these natural mysteries that will form us into better people, provide a grounding of morality, give us hope in a broken world, and turn us away from the nihilistic reality a strict physicalism entails. If the final knowledge these mysteries usher us into is a reminder that this earth is not our home, we no longer have a religion we would die for; we don’t even have one we could live for.

Bigthink

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-innate-violence-of-activism.html?m=1

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/no-platforming-neofascists/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2016/05/04/were-talking-about-practice/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/04/venezuela-is-becoming-a-failed-state/