Thanks to my brother's thoughtful birthday gift, I've been reading Embracing Grace by Scot McKnight over the past couple of days. Some thoughts that dove-tail with last week's discussion of narratives, meta-narratives, and consumerism:
1. He cites Andrew Delbanco's sketch of American social history The Real American Dream. Delbanco contends that we've moved through three periods in our nation's development: God, Nation, and Self. The marker of the current era, Self, is that our culture is so self-absorbed "the modern self becomes all and nothing at the same time."
2. McKnight pulls a fantastic quote from Lesslie Newbigin's "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society" which is a great read for anyone out there interested in engaging this whole idea of narratives and meta-narratives: "...if there is no point in the story as a whole, there is no point in my own action. If the story is meaningless, any action of mine is meaningless...so the answer to the question, "Who am I?" can only be given as we ask, "What is my story?" and that can only be answered if there is an answer to the further question, "What is the whole story of which my story is a part?"
3. Macon commented last week that our self-absorbed consumerism could be the result of the relatively peaceful period of life most of us growing up in the U.S. have experienced over the past 30-40 years. I think that there may be something to this, although I'm certainly not a proponent of character-building mass-warfare. Much has (rightly) been said and written and studied about the horrific cost of war. Much less has been said and written and studied about the cost of peace. Rome's collapse was first an internal one, after an unprecedented period of peace--"the Pax Romana."
1 comment:
I live within 5 miles of Scot Mcknight ... that's almost as cool as living within 5 miles of Daniel Kirk.
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