Here's a quote from the First Things blog by Carl Trueman, about our passion for entertainment:

For Augustine, the human obsession with entertainment in general was problematic.  He saw the need of people to be constantly entertained as a deceptive act of self-love, an attempt to flee the reality of our own mortality. That is why he lambasts the Roman exiles in Hippo who have fled Rome in the wake of Alaric’s attack and yet who persist in the desperate pursuit of theatrical entertainment (City of God 1:32). The theater was a means of distracting them from the real world with its real challenges and claims upon them. No doubt he would regard the modern affluent West, with its penchant for paying sports stars far more than nurses or doctors or carers, as a prime example of the way our need for distraction shapes the moral priorities of our economies.

Culture and the Light of Faith

One of my favorite authors is Robert L. Wilken, who is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He has an article in the Feburary 2011 issue of First Things in which he reflects on the ability of the Christian faith to incorporate and transform elements from Latin and Greek culture, thereby enriching the Christian civilization. He draws on a recent title by Remi Brague, Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization. Wilken's essay is marvelous, citing the Christian poet Prudentius and the bishop Isidore of  Seville as examples of appropriating and enriching earlier cultural achievements.

By all means, read the article.Here are some thoughts to ponder:

In an individual believer, faith can exist without reason. God does not measure out the supernatural gifts of grace according to IQ. Yet, as a community, the Church needs reason to give faith cultural heft and the density of varied expression in language, whether it be the disciplined, imaginative reasoning that poetry requires, or the elemntary, conceptual resaoning of grammar.

Reason, for its part, needs faith because the natural powers of the human intellect easily lose sight of their goal, which is the fullness of truth, and can become susceptible to various forms of authoritarianism and intolerance.

Has anyone heard of George Parkin Grant?

George Grant was a Canadian political philosopher whose thoughts about higher education and the Christian faith are very trenchant. I heard about him through his book, Technology and Society, that was published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

In this book he has an extended rumination on the nature faith and education called "Faith and the Multiversity." Just to give a sample, he talks about the relation of the paradigm of knowledge as presented in the modern university to faith. "'Faith', he writes, is one of the central words of western thought which has had many meanings. What I intend by it is Simone Weil's definition: Faith is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love." Such a sentence, of course, simply moves one from the uncertainty of 'faith' to the even greater complexity of the word 'love'." (page 38) And off he goes . . .