Enjoying My Christmas Presents

In the past several days I have begun to use my Christmas presents. The first I used was my new cordless drill. I used it to put together a new magazine rack, also a Christmas present, for my office. The next of my presents to be used was one of the books given to me, a book by David Bentley Hart. The book is entitled "In The Aftermath" and consists of a series of essays previously written by the author in various magazines.

I would like to preface the following quotes from the first two or three essays in this book with the reasons why I find these particular quotations meaningful. One of my projects during the past several years has been a systematic reading of Balthasar's "Glory of the Lord", the first part of a trilogy in which he undertakes an attempt to restore beauty and the transcendent to its rightful place alongside the good and the true. Given our amorous relationship with reason and science, we have lost our awe of the transcendent.

The first two of the quotes below, I think, speak to this issue. I know that many religious writers have expressed their thoughts about these issues and it's been my experience that people are unwilling to rehash issues such as homosexuality and abortion. We Christians find ourselves less strident in promulgating our ideas regarding these issues because we find ourselves in the midst of those who scream intolerance when they are raised. I'm offering these quotes not to incite anyone to action or to incite those in disagreement to a greater fury, but rather because I find these ideas especially well expressed by this author. The third quote is taken from the writings of a little-known historian, Maurice Cowling (at least he is little known by me). Hart reviewed one of Cowling’s works and I thought it was a rather interesting, if cold and impersonal, definition of Christianity and so I'm sharing it with you.

Quote 1

“And everyone with some consciousness of cultural history should certainly dread whatever rough beast it is that is being bred in our ever coarser, crueler, more inarticulate, more vacuous popular culture; because, cloaked in its anodyne insipience, lies a world increasingly devoid of merit, wit, kindness, imagination, or charity.”

Quote 2

“How, after all, should Christians regard the present age when, in America alone, more than 40 million babies have been killed in the womb since the Supreme Court invented the right to abortion, and when there are many who see these deaths not just as tragic necessities, but as blameless consequences of a moral social triumph? When the Carthaginians were prevailed upon to cease sacrificing their babies, at least the place vacated by Baal reminded them that they should seek the divine above themselves; but our culture offers up its babies to “my” freedom of choice, to “me.” Surely a Christian must doubt that any other society’s moral vision has ever shown itself to be more degenerate.”

Quote 3

"Christianity is a cultural and spiritual ecology, an impulse towards the ideal or ultimate that takes form in the bones and sinews (the cultural grammar) of a civilization, as well as a corporate and private habit of orientations, limits, practices, and possibilities -- all of which allow for various social philosophies to arise and flourish, but which cannot be reduced to any of them."