Decision Fatigue

31 08 2011

Decision-making is exhausting. That’s what New York Times columnist John Tierney explains in his recent and fascinating article entitled, “Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?” Whether it’s in the supermarket, on the Internet, or in our home or workplace, we are inundated with more choices than we can possibly process, aren’t we? We face hundreds of decisions each day, from mundane to metaphysical, and this constant bombardment of choices has some surprising individual and cultural effects. Tierney writes:

The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice.[1]

In addition to explaining my sometimes impulsive and indecisive shopping habits, I find this article makes sense on a much deeper level. Consider the deep questions we face when choosing a religious view, for example: Which God or religion should I follow? Which church, temple, mosque, synagogue, or humanist organization should I attend? Or maybe I should read some books first. But which ones? There are so many, and they’re all written by intelligent people, many with PhDs who know more about their subject than I ever could. Plus, none of them worship the same thing in the same way, and everyone seems to disagree on every conceivable religious or philosophical topic out there. How can I figure all of this stuff out with any degree of certainty?

When decision fatigue plagues us with tough kinds of religious questions, many of us tend either to bounce from one practice to another, thus experimenting with the latest spiritual trend, or we conclude that it’s impossible to know anything definitively, so why not reserve judgment until the day when it all makes sense? This type of thinking is especially prevalent in the United States today, where the fastest growing segment of the population claims to be religiously unaffiliated yet varies widely in their religious beliefs and practices. [2] [3]

Still, we know that humans are innately religious, and that our desire to worship something—whether it is a tribal god, a political leader, or a football team—appears to be hardwired into our genetic makeup from the very beginning.[4] Unfortunately, this aspect of our human nature doesn’t make the decision of who or what to worship any easier. Regardless of what we may believe about God or religion, not taking our beliefs and practices seriously could have drastic consequences in this life or another one.

So how do we counter decision fatigue of the religious sort? Rather than succumbing to the extremes of impulsive religious experimentalism or hyper-cautious agnosticism, we could face our religious decision fatigue with steadfastness and courage. We could spend time with people who live out what they preach in their faith communities, read their sacred texts and commentaries, and attempt to maintain an open mind and a keen eye during the process.[5] This may sound like a lot of time and effort, and it very well could be!

But fortunately some of the best decisions we make in life begin with a simple, playful curiosity to go and see someone or something that’s intriguing. The disciples in the New Testament certainly had such an occasion when they met Jesus of Nazareth for the first time: “They said to him, Rabbi’ (which is to say, when translated, Teacher), ‘where are You staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where He was staying….”[5] Indeed, if a simple decision like going to see where someone is spending the night can be the start of something momentous, (as it was for the disciples), we should be reassured that, despite our experience with decision fatigue, the very same possibility exists for us.


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An Atheis… oops, Religious Response

29 08 2011

Among the toughest questions I have been asked as a pastor is some variation of the following: Why is God allowing this to happen to me? The life situations that prompt this question can range from the relatively insignificant to the profoundly traumatic, but the brute existential fact about life on this planet is that things do not always—or even often—go as we want them to. If God is in control, and God is supposed to be good, why all this misery?  Why any misery for that matter?

Christopher Hitchens, the famous atheist author of god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, asked similar questions in an essay written after the 2010 death of Tsutomu Yamaguchi—one of the few people to live through the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If ever there was someone who had a right to wonder about the order and goodness of the cosmos it would be Yamaguchi!

According to Hitchens, whatever else might be said about Yamaguchi’s story, it is “one of those cases that demonstrates the absolute uselessness of official piety.”  Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism—all are equally worthless in preventing or altering their adherents’ experience in a world full of chaos and pain. Yamaguchi was just the victim of dumb bad luck in world devoid of purpose. There is no God presiding over the cosmos and it is foolishly naive to think so. All religion does is pile illusion upon misery. The only proper response to the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi—or any of the horrors of history—is (pardon Hitchens’s indelicate terminology) “WTF?”

What Hitchens seems not to realize is that “WTF?” isn’t all that original a response to the problem of evil. In fact, it’s a downright religious one. It’s even a biblical one. The Psalms of lament frequently express bewilderment, frustration, and anger at the apparent triumph of evil over good.

Psalm 6:1-3, for example, says this:

How long, O LORD Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death.

Or how about Psalm 74:9-13?

We are given no miraculous signs;
no prophets are left,
and none of us knows how long this will be.

How long will the enemy mock you, O God?
Will the foe revile your name forever?

Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand?

Many other examples could be cited within the Psalter alone, to say nothing of books like Job and Lamentations. Hitchens’s protest is neither new nor unique to modern atheism.

While the biblical writers may not phrase things as crudely as Hitchens, the questions they ask are the same: Why don’t the good guys win more often? Why isn’t there a more obvious connection between virtue and blessing? Why is hardship so indiscriminately distributed (a question Hitchens has, tragically, become intimately acquainted with in his ongoing battle with esophageal cancer that began mere months after the publication of this article)? Why doesn’t the state of the world make more moral sense to us? What’s wrong here?

For Hitchens, WTF? is “one of the most pressing, relevant, and ultimately humane” questions we can ask. And indeed, it is. I think the Hebrew poets would agree. I think they would move on, though, to say that it is a question that can only be coherently asked within a worldview where we have good reasons to expect things to be better than they are.

Ryan Dueck

[Note: Ryan is the newest Wondering Fair contributor; it is a pleasure to have you with us, Ryan! He runs an excellent blog called Rumblings.]


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Categories : Tough Questions

Looking for Infinity

26 08 2011

It is a fault of infinity to be too small to find. It is a fault of eternity to be crowded out by time. Before our eyes we see an unbroken sheath of colors. We live over a bulk of things. We walk amid a congeries of colored things that part before our steps to reveal more colored colored things. Above us hurtle more things, which fill the universe. There is no crack. Mountains and hills, lakes, deserts, forests, and plains fully occupy their continents. Where, then, is the gap through which eternity streams?

And this is what we love: this human-scented skull, the sheen on the skin of a face, this exhilarating game, this crowded feast, these shifting mountains, the dense water and its piercing lights. It is our lives we love, our times, our generation, our pursuits. And are we called to forsake these vivid and palpable goods for an idea of which we experience nor one trace? Am I to believe eternity outranks my child’s finger?

Let us rest the material view and consider, just consider, that the weft of materials admits of a very few, faint, unlikely gaps. People are, after all, still disappearing, still roping robes on themselves, still braving the work of prayer, insisting they hear something, even fighting and still dying for it. The impulse to a spiritual view persists, and the evidence of that view’s power among historical forces and among contemporary ideas persists, and the claim of reasoning men and women that they know God from experience persists.

This Bible, this ubiquitous, persistent black chunk of a bestseller, is a chink – often the only chink – through which winds howl. It is a singularity, a black hole into which our rich and multiple world strays and vanishes. We crack open its pages at our peril. Many educated, urbane, and flourishing experts in every aspect of business, culture, and science have felt pulled by this anachronistic, semibarbaric mass of antique laws and fabulous tales from far away; they entered its queer, strait gates and were lost. Eyes open, heads high, in full possession of their critical minds, they obeyed the high, inaudible whistle, and let the gates close behind them.

Annie Dillard

(Excerpt abridged from “The Book of Luke”, The Annie Dillard Reader, 265-266.)


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Is There Life After Success?

24 08 2011

To answer this question, we need to understand what success in life is:
When you are 12-months-old, success is to be able to walk.
When you are 2, success is not pee in the pants.
When you are 15, success is to have sex.
When you are 18, success is to have a driver’s licence.
When you are 30, success is to have money.
When you are 60, success is to have a lot more money.
When you are 70, success is to have a driver’s licence.
When you are 80, success is to have sex.
When you are 85, success is to have a lot of friends.
When you are 90, success is to not pee in the pants.
When you are 95, success is to be able to walk.

Moral: success varies according to what it signifies in each stage of life and in the culture we belong to. For a competing athlete, success is to be a champion. For the gunman, success is the number of unhappy souls that have crossed his path. Success is the realization of a dream, but once the target is met, success loses its reason for being and we feel aimless.

I, for one, fell in love with cars as a little boy, and aspired to become a race driver for my whole life. I worked hard, trained exhaustively, tried to summon all the resources I could reach to fund my racing, until I arrived at the top racing category: the Formula 1. Those were thrilling, challenging, intense years, but when they finished, I could not help but ask: now what?

Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy. For such a person, the end of a successful career is the end of the line. His destiny is to die of bitterness or to search for more success in other careers and to go on living from success to success until he falls dead. In this case, there will not be life after success.

In order to survive success, we need instead to find the meaning of our life, to discover our true vocation and the purpose that justifies our existence. As Frederick Buechner puts it, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”[1] In this perspective, Mother Teresa was much wealthier than Bill Gates, at least until the day in which he stopped running Microsoft to dedicate himself to philanthropy and humanitarian help, in the search for a purpose for his life. To help others is surely a more noble kind of enterprise, yet the problem is that noble and praiseworthy success is still perishable success. Any life project that does not transcend the here and now is faded to end in a cemetery.

I believe lasting success is success that transcends the grave. Death gathers all limitations that result from our disconnection from the source of life. And in my analysis, throughout cockpits and soccer stadiums and victory celebrations and losses at the last inch and days of plain routine, I have not found someone who can reconcile and reconnect us to the source and maintainer of life as Jesus Christ does. Only through him will there be life after all and every success.

Alex Dias Ribeiro is a former Formula 1 driver, and has accompanied the Brazilian teams as a chaplain in many of the last World Cups and Summer Olympics.

[1] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (New York: HarperOne, 1993).


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Gauguin’s Blue

22 08 2011

In 1891 Paul Gauguin sailed for Tahiti, in search of a civilization purer than his native France, and in 1897, after a month of feverish work, he completed his most eloquent painting. Gauguin regarded this work of maturity as “his masterpiece and the summation of his ideas,” and named it Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? It is an impressive painting, culminating Gauguin’s post-impressionistic style which, similar to that of Van Gogh, uses colors and symbolism vividly, to depict not only an objective landscape but also the internal worldview of the artist.

The wide painting, indicated by Gauguin to be read from the right to the left, portrays a curious cycle of life: a newborn next to three women; a seated person inspecting his body, ahead of two weeping female figures; at the center, the only male character wears a simple loincloth and reaches up for an apple, symbol of exploration and of original sin, while a girl to his left eats an apple; until, after a few more figures, an old woman awaits her death in the far left. The flow of life is watched by a blue idol, which represents “the Beyond” for Gauguin.

As the title suggests, the painting portrays Gauguin’s struggle with the meaning of existence. With his brushstrokes and inventive colors, Gauguin’s post-impressionism wanted to ask questions; he wanted to overcome in painting the mere depiction of reality, and to search for also “the mystery and the enigma of the great world in which we live.” So here, with the baby and the attentive women on the right, Gauguin invites us to ask, “Where do we come from?” The mixture of exploration and sorrowful realization of the central characters portrays our quest for knowledge, “What are we?” Finally, with the old woman watching the white dove, we cry out, “Where are we going?”

But where is the answer to these existential questions, according to Gauguin? I believe one particular color gives us a hint. Gauguin’s original use of color is one of the features that made him transcend impressionism and forge post-impressionism, after all. Notice one key detail: Gauguin portrays the religious idol in a blue similar to that of the sky, rocks and trees. It is a Beyond which is also infused in the landscape, an immanent transcendence, a wonder we feel not only at temples but also at the amphitheater of nature. The idol is blue like the trees: our religion is natural, and nature is sacred.

Yet, almost before finishing the painting, Gauguin despaired, and attempted suicide with a dose of arsenic. But the dose was so heavy that he vomited it, ironically, and the poison did not reach his veins. As Gauguin strived for the meaning of existence, neither the natural beauty of Tahiti nor the overpowering flush of creativity satisfied his soul. He immersed himself in an exotic civilization and in intimacy with nature, in his search for the Beyond, but he doesn’t feel close to it; by attempting suicide he places himself instead next to the aged woman, longing for death.

Gauguin’s “Beyond” was blue like the landscape, and this may have been the problem: it observes the cycle of life detached, passively, as a chameleon imprisoned in the cycle it is supposed to transcend. It does not lie beyond the picture; it cannot answer our existential questions. It is arresting like nature in its mystic blue, but it is not more than that. Curiously, Gauguin wanted to transcend nature in his art, but had not transcended it in his philosophy. His Beyond stands still within nature, and he leaves us with his characters, wondering without answers life’s ultimate questions.

René Breuel


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“Smaller Bites”

19 08 2011

Two years ago, I walked into a stranger’s hospital room just hours after she’d given birth to a little blue eyed, blonde boy – my boy!  I hadn’t foreseen adoption when I embarked on my own journey of becoming a mom.  Such an unconventional path – a mom would go to a hospital and give birth to a beautiful son, but a different mom – me – would be taking that son home.  Though the process was out of the ordinary, there was no question in my heart – this was my son Tristen, now and forever.

His existence in our hearts was conceived one night when Ken and I looked at each other and said “Let’s have kids.”  Little did we know, that very month, our son’s older sister was born (who was adopted by another family) and it would still be more than a year before his mom would become pregnant with him. The day I carried him out of the hospital was the day a two year dream came true.

I have an inexplicable connection to both of my sons—Trey was the child who would routinely go 23 hours without moving inside my uterus (if baby goes 24 hours, it’s the first signal of concern to doctors) and when I see his calm, thoughtful personality, I remember my pregnancy. He’s always been this way.

I have a different connection to Tristen. Ironically, he looks just like me, and our birthdays are 4 days apart. With him, I have the questions that existed in my heart answered daily: What will he look like? What will his personality be like? He existed in my heart well before he was even conceived, and daily I celebrate who he is and the little person he is becoming.

Adopted children respond to the initial rejection from their biological parents in different manners, and psychological studies show that most of them exhibit specific behavioral patterns. One of these currently manifesting in our family involves food.  Our darling angel can pack food into his mouth faster than a squirrel can pack nuts. He’s convinced that his mouth can fit his whole sandwich, rather than a rational sized bite. He chokes, coughs, gags and tries to take drinks to help it all down. “Smaller bites,” we say, but the minute we turn our backs, his entire cupcake has disappeared….and it is not on the floor.

His little mind is saying “I need to eat enough food today so if they abandon me tomorrow, I will have prepared for it,” despite the fact that in his 2 years of life we have neither abandoned him nor forgotten to feed him.

And yet my heart does that, too. Even though my Christian faith tells me I’m God’s child, and that He takes constant care of me, I often find myself stuffing my stomach, my schedule, my bank account, and my dreams, so I have something in case God abandons me. You know–just in case. He has never let me down before, but my fears tempt me to accumulate, and to prepare for the worst.

I look at Tristen, and laugh at his cupcake-filled mouth, and all the little crumbs left on the table. I think that’s how God looks at His adopted children too. When we worry, wondering if He will be there to provide for us, He sees our anxious insecurity, our proneness to fear and accumulation, and laughs: “Smaller bites, Darling. Smaller bites.”

Roanna Canete currently lives in Rome with her two small sons and lovely husband Ken.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Riots and Resistance

17 08 2011

There’s been a lot of talk in the international news of an ‘Arab Spring,’ a term encapsulating the unrest and protest by groups of people in the Middle East, and increasingly elsewhere, against autocratic governments and the burdens they place on citizens. Such ‘springs’ are uprisings by the people for the people, with the aim of creating momentum towards greater freedom and democracy.

The riots experienced here in the UK are nothing like that. Here in Britain we’ve had an uprising of an altogether different nature.

Over the past week or so a number of cities across the UK, beginning in London, have seen hordes of (mainly) youths marauding the streets committing wanton acts of aggression and destruction. Millions of pounds worth of damage has accrued due to vandalism, arson and theft. Shops have been looted and burned to the ground. Businesses built over generations have been lost. There’s even been a fatal shooting. So apparently mindless is the violence that some of the rioters even torched their own homes and neighbourhoods. And so perverse is the anarchic spirit at work, that while innocent victims of these crimes struggle to deal with their losses, rioters can be seen in video footage giggling at their handiwork, while looters have posted pictures of themselves grinning beside their caches of stolen goods. Whatever the underlying factors contributing to such behaviour—you can blame it on poverty or fatherlessness or political alienation—it seems this is less about social or economic deprivation, but something else entirely. Having witnessed a shopping centre ransacked by youngsters, one police chief observed, “This wasn’t an angry crowd, this was a greedy crowd.”

Political uprising is one thing, but what are we to make of this? Writing in The Times, Sarah Vine said that she was all in favour of paying taxes to house and educate those who need it, “but when they turn around and throw it back in our faces like delinquent children denied the latest Xbox, a screw turns dangerously tight in the heart.”

It seems impossible not to share her sentiment. How can one not be angry at the depth of destruction and the shallowness of the mob? What is the Christian response? I’m not sure what the official ‘church’ response has been, but it appears that one appropriate response has already been demonstrated in some of the affected areas by residents of different faiths or no faith. In defiance of the destruction levied on them, residents of Clapham, London, armed themselves with brooms and took to the streets to clean up. The spirit of anarchy has been met by a spirit of resilience and hope. With no outside prompting, people are joining together to repair the damage, and so communities are being strengthened by a shared sense of purpose as opposed to merely a shared postcode.

We can lament the state of western culture when its youth commit crimes in the name of greed and entitlement. We can talk till the cows come home about why and how such a thing has come to pass. But if that screw in our hearts is not to tighten further, we need to find a way of responding that will not darken our own hearts. We needn’t try to feel less angry. Anger is appropriate in this instance. Many of the Psalms exemplify the outpouring of anger and despair. What we need to do is acknowledge our anger yet defy the ways it twists our hearts. That requires meeting the spirit of rebellion with the spirit of resistance: reconciliation not revenge, brooms not bats, community welfare not gang warfare. Such a view is necessarily a long term one. It takes time to rebuild broken walls and forgiveness to repair broken lives. But as I understand it, this is what Christ asked people to do. The man who said “do not repay evil with evil”, and who himself faced plenty, either lacked the courage to get even or he knew what he was talking about.

Madi Simpson


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

Confessions of a XXXL

15 08 2011

I never thought I would come to wear XXXL shorts one day. Three Xs! One X would not shake my self-image, but three is a sizeable number, let’s admit. The L did not fit, nor the XL, nor the XXL; only the XXXL fit well, though I have to wear a belt to keep it from falling down.

Let me explain, though. I have been eating more than I should, true, but I blame only the Chinese for the three Xs. I was in a Chinatown store, trying shorts in a dark back room smelling aged cardboard boxes. Sarah had bought me M-sized shorts, which would fit me back in teenage days, but recent years, and generous food portions and occasional snacks,  led me to upgrade part of my clothing to an ominous L. L is the letter just before M in the alphabet, but for me it meant graduation from “eat everything and don’t put on weight” adolescence, to “eat an extra green pea and gain weight” adulthood. Ok, not a green pea, but an extra pie slice does the job.

But here is my redemption: it’s the Chinese who put the XXX before the L. As I tried shorts with increasingly judgmental labels in the back room, I felt little difference between M and L-sized shorts, and practically no difference between L, XL, and XXL. It was only the XXXL which felt considerably different; the other ones were more like variations – mocking variations – of the M-sized shorts. But before anyone suspects I’m scapegoating the Chinese so I can get myself off the hook, and from Jessica’s last Wondering Fair article, here’s exhibit B, so I can rest my case: a friend who lives in Shanghai told me she can find suitable clothes only in international stores; the Chinese markets simply don’t have her size. See? The fault is all Chinese. They are a thin people, and one that knows that extra fabric increases the cost and global competiveness  of manufacturing goods.

Still, my XXXL shorts keep staring at me. Even if I cut the labels out, they gossip and judge and point fingers among themselves. They have been the tipping point of my resolve to eat less and exercise more. I had been postponing my thinner self after one more gelato, one more afternoon snack. Their prohibitiveness  spiced them with even more flavor. But now I know that if I want to pay cheap, the Chinese store won’t have a size larger than XXXL, so I’d better try to eliminate the Xs. Even if I can’t go back to a Western M, I’m aiming for a Chinese L at least.

I find these crisis moments painful but helpful. They wake us up from harmful habits; they add urgency to our lukewarm resolve. Be it through XXXL clothes, or XXX websites, we can see our deformed self in the mirror, and notice the shades our habits add to our face. We notice that we haven’t given money away in a month, or haven’t said “thank you” in a week, and wonder what has crippled our hearts this way. Ugliness has a funny way of alarming us. Beauty enthralls, but ugliness repels, and prompts us to run away from its face.

Still, I know of another crisis moment which motivates me more. Another ugly image which propels me more strongly toward beauty. On the cross, we see beauty taking on ugliness, we see divinity stained with human sin.  If I’m tempted to postpone resolve, on the cross I see God’s resolve to reform my heart. If I despair of ever being able to change, on the cross I see God’s solution to my despair, and the motivation for my search for wellness. On the cross I see my true redemption, based not on blame shifting but on the true scapegoat: Jesus, who put on my ugliness so I can display his beauty. The journey away from XXXL clothes maybe be uncomfortable, but Jesus addressed my deeper problem on the cross, the sin and anxiety I try to satisfy with eating, and gave me a comfort of heart sufficient for any momentary discomfort of body.

René Breuel


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Gluttony, Justice, and Grace

12 08 2011

Donna Simpson has been making headlines over the past few weeks for her goal of becoming the world’s fattest woman. News clips of the morbidly obese woman discussing her goal run like  parodies of similar human interest stories: her partner “supporting” Donna in her run for the record-books and Donna discussing her lack of fear in the face of such a dangerous endeavor, because she believes “our time is set.” Curiously, Donna’s comments suggest a vaguely religious outlook in which God has planned each individual’s death and the individual’s own actions can do little to alter this inevitable end, an outlook that allows her to face her world-record attempt without fear.

Despite gluttony being one of the “seven deadly sins” of tradition, studies on obesity in America by Purdue University sociologist Ken Ferraro note an uncanny link between Christian faith and obesity, with obesity increasing as people move closer toward Christian fundamentalism. Perhaps because so many Christians are so large, one is hard pressed to find many pastors preaching against the evils of gluttony and resulting obesity. What is more, not only is it socially unacceptable to criticize people for being overweight, such criticisms often fail to take account of the medical and psychological reasons why a person is fat. I would like to think that the lack of Christian outcry about obesity and its causes grows out of a deep love of people and a desire to take account of these root causes. However, given the willingness of many Christians to rail on anyone for being gay or for having an abortion, it seems far more likely that the church’s silence on gluttony is because this sin hits too close to home.

So, why then am I willing to rush headlong into discussing obesity and linking it to the traditional sin of gluttony? After all such a move risks at least insensitivity, if not outright offense. But I believe we must discuss gluttony as such because, in doing so, we begin to depoliticize the issue of obesity and return food to its proper place within creation.  Through this, we realize that the biblical concept of gluttony is not a prohibition against yet another pleasure of the flesh but an issue of justice and peace that has implications that reach even farther than western countries’ ever-expanding waistlines.

Reflecting on gluttony within a biblical worldview reveals that gluttony is not about having a svelte form but about consuming more than one needs, which always proves to be detrimental to others and the self. Put this way, gluttony is not just about over-eating but about the myriad forms of overconsumption that grip the west, implicating everyone, even the thin. Gluttony―be it energy gluttony, clothes gluttony, technology gluttony, food gluttony, debt gluttony―is ultimately a justice issue. Whether it is the farm-worker who supplies cheap food, the sweatshop teenager who makes cheap clothes, or the Mexican peasant who can’t afford corn because the prices are inflated due to the biofuel market, in a finite world of finite resources, when one person consumes more than he needs, it is quite likely that someone else doesn’t get enough, or that someone else is abused in the process of fulfilling the rapacious appetites of another. Frequently, the image of the glutton is combined with the drunkard, suggesting the person whose consumption denigrates themselves while risking violence to others.

As bleak and condemnatory as this biblical image of the glutton sounds, I believe it is be liberating because the biblical solution to gluttony isn’t to be found in strict-diets, calorie-counting and exercise regimes, or even in turning off the lights, buying energy-efficient light bulbs and thrift store clothes. Such solutions will, at best, eliminate some of the forms or appearance of gluttony but not restore a right-relationship between the individual and the created world. As American farmer Wendell Berry puts it, “…we cannot live harmlessly, or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”[1]  Thus, the biblical response to gluttony involves learning to see the finite, created world as a gift to be consumed lovingly―it is a vision of consumption with restraint growing out of respect for the people and processes that go into producing a fresh loaf of bread, a bunch of grapes, or a glass of wine.

Jessica Hughes

[1] From Wendell Berry’s “The Gift of Good Land” (1979),  in The Art of the Commonplace, ed by Norman Wirzba, 2002, 304)


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Categories : Making a Difference

Is Secularism a Faith?

10 08 2011

In a fascinating review of Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age, secular humanist Andrew Koppelman said a few years back:

[M]odern secularism is a religious worldview, with its own narrative of testing and redemption, and shares the vulnerabilities of such views. The news that secularists also live in glass houses has implications for ongoing stone-throwing operations.

The reason why I love this review, and often come back to it in discussions, is because it is one of the more honest evaluations of the emerging secular framework done by one of their own. Koppelman notes, for instance, that modern Western secularism has its roots in Christian theology, and that secularism’s continued commitment to human rights does not logically flow from atheism. The article continues to note that as a secularist he thinks his own worldview has a faith/hope underpinning, much like the religious views that secularism tends to mock. These features mean that, for Koppelman, both religious and secularist worldviews have a form of “gap”: he notes that the “gap” in religions is the fact that one has to believe that in history amazing actions and events have happened, while the “gap” in secularism is that there is a normative commitment to human rights that does not seem to be able to be accounted for by mere evolutionary principles.

Still, while acknowledging that all faiths require a “leap,” Koppelman continues to argue that secularism has a smaller leap of faith. For him, you don’t have to believe in any historical event, just a common commitment to human life void of an overarching system. He says, “Secularists are committed to what one might call “Naked Strong Evaluation”: the idea, unsupported by any particular metaphysical claim, that the commitment to decent treatment for all human beings is mandatory…” I appreciate Koppelman’s honesty in the article to acknowledge that his own position takes epistemic faith, much like Christianity. I also appreciate that he acknowledges that the idea of human rights did not originate in atheism, but in fact Christian doctrine.

So while Koppelman seems to think that secularism borrows Christian capital to account for human rights and morality, he doesn’t think it necessarily invalidates his position. In the end of his review, Koppelman goes to Martin Luther King Jr. and notes that it was his Christian faith that drove him to stand up for justice in the midst of oppression, and it would be wrong to negate the good of his work simply because of the foundation he drew from.

The candidness of Koppelman is refreshing, and it demonstrates how harder it will be for secularists to make moral claims of injustice the further Western culture gets from Christendom. An example can illustrate this: a book review in the Wall Street Journal notes that the sex ratio of the worldwide population has unnaturally skewed to be male heavy. The author concludes that the only explanation is that girls are being aborted at an alarming rate simply because of their sex. The right to live is coming up against the rights of the parents to want a happy and nice life that they think sons will provide for them instead of daughters.

So who gets to win? The secularist today would say the little girls’ right to live wins because it is a higher good, compared to the parents’ preferences. For now. Without a mooring of morality into something deeper than “it makes sense,” atrocities can seem justifiable. Just look at the psychology of the Holocaust. On the other hand, Christianity roots human rights in the imago dei, and humans made in God’s image not only have to be treated with sacred dignity, but also cannot be reduced to “it makes sense.”

Both religious and secularist views are forms of faith; both have “leaps;” both make moral assertions. Yet Koppelman makes clear that, in regards to human rights, one offers better consistency for those of us who care about massacres, the poor, and the AIDS epidemic – and it is not his own point of view. The big question for those of us who care about these things is then, where is your view of morality located?

Michael Keller

[Note: this article is by Wondering Fair's newest contributor, Michael Keller. Great to have you with us, Michael!]


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