In a recent article in The Atlantic, columnist David Brooks commented on the necessity of personal security for human flourishing to occur. Correctly, he observes the multi-faceted nature of “security.” It involves financial, emotional, social and personal identity categories, each of which demonstrates how complicated human beings are when it comes to what produces security in their lives.
How Americans view their history is important, for that narrative is what is taught in our schools and informs how we view current issues in their historical perspective. Until fairly recently, there was a consensus among most Americans about that narrative. No longer. There are at least two competing narratives that dominate America’s educational curriculums and the various media outlets.
When it comes to gender issues in Western Civilization, confusion reigns supreme. Arguably, the next dimension of the postmodern sexual revolution, indeed the next civil rights movement, is the transgender one. Kay Steinmetz of Time magazine writes, “Transgender people—those who identify with a gender other than the sex they were ‘assigned at birth,’ to use the preferred phrase among trans activists—are emerging from the margins to fight for an equal place in society.”
The late British theologian, J.I. Packer, reminds us of a profound truth: “Christians are not to think of themselves as ever at home in this world but rather as sojourning aliens, travelers passing through a foreign land to the place where their treasures are stored awaiting their arrival” (see 1 Peter 2:11; Matthew 6:19-20). We are citizens of Christ’s kingdom.
In early October 2020, Emmanuelle Charpentier (director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin) and Jennifer A. Doudna (professor at the University of California, Berkeley) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their 2012 work on Crispir-Cas9, a method to edit DNA. It was the first time the award went to two women. Their 2012 paper was a pioneering work on Crispr gene-editing.
The year 2020 has been an extraordinary year. For me as a Christian leader, two themes have dominated the complicated developments of 2020: Religious liberty issues inherent in a number of Supreme Court decisions and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
O. Alan Noble of Oklahoma Baptist University perceptively and solemnly observes, “Whether you describe it as a decadent society or a decaying culture or a democracy dying in darkness, 2020 has given us a taste for what Cormac McCarthy once described as ‘the frailty of everything revealed at last.’ We have been frail for a very long time, but what we could deny before has been made glaringly manifest through a pandemic, racial injustice, social unrest, mass unemployment, and a highly contentious presidential election that earnest folks on both sides have described in existential terms.
Meaningful spirituality focuses on four components: meaning, purpose, community, and ritual. Centered in Jesus Christ, genuine, biblical Christianity offers eternally significant content to these four components. However, within American culture today an amalgamation of cultural forces constitute what Tara Isabella Burton calls “Remixed Spirituality.”
Years ago, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an important book entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics, in which he documented the role paranoia, fear and conspiracy theories have played in American political culture. He called it “an arena for angry minds.”
A major premise of Scripture is that leaders are always called to a higher standard. Indeed, spiritual leaders in the church and in ministry are called to be “above reproach” (1 Timothy 3:2). Leaders in ministry are to be servant leaders, modeling the biblical truths they espouse (see Philippians 2:5-11, Luke 22:21-30 and John 13:1-17). Leaders are to avoid even the “appearance of evil” in their lifestyles and in their words (1 Thessalonians 5:22).
