News in the rearviewmirror
Exegeting media from the past week through the interpretive lens of faith, hope and love.
Welcome to the first of a regular close reading of some of the news stories and op-ed pieces from the past week through the hermeneutical lens of the 'grammar of the gospel' (TF Torrance), to see if there's a way of thinking 'Christian-ly' about current events that doesn't veer far-left or far-right or bow to any prevailing ideologies. Does this mean you have to be a Christian to read this, or that it's going to be a religious undertaking? Not at all — yuck. That's anathema to me and it's also terrible theology. Faith, hope and love are human ways of knowing ... not religious ways of knowing.
I've written before about how I believe the faith, hope and love spoken about in the New Testament are not religious categories — you don't have to be a believer for them to make sense, and in fact, a lot of the time being a believer gets in the way of them making sense, as we'll see. Faith, hope and love are ways of knowing (epistemologies), or interpretive prisms through which to see the world in a counter-cultural, contra-ideological and non-religious way. Early church writer Paul, for example, spoke about faith, hope and love as new glasses that had transformed how he saw the world and shattered other ways of thinking that prevailed at the time, including those of the Judaism he had strictly followed his entire life. It was revolutionary, yes, but also consistent with the freedom and promise he believed the gospel (good news) was all about.
I think Christendom has forgotten how to do this with grace, and I think the world is worse off for it. Christendom has moved from thinking its task is to convert the world (it isn't) to recruiting the world to its politics (it isn't this either) to storming the halls of power and ruling with an iron fist (it certainly isn't this).
Faith, hope and love are none of these … they are about conviction first, followed by listening, engaging, treasuring and creating.
On that note, to the news ...
May 20
A story in The Economist about Russians who moved to Argentina when the invasion of Ukraine began, because Argentina still accepted their visas and these families wanted a future for their children. This is hope as a way of knowing ... finding a way, forging possibilities in the face of the barbed wire of current events that threaten to hem us in. Also a timely reminder that among the 'enemy' are people just like us, who would do anything to give their kids a future. Why have pregnant Russians flocked to Argentina since the invasion of Ukraine?
A couple of stories out of Australia on the demise of volunteering, post-pandemic. According to the Herald Sun, almost two million Australians have stopped volunteering since Covid, which will be addressed by a $3 million national advertising campaign to generate more participation. Around the same time, stories emerged about how volunteering boosts kids' mental health. I saw one story in The Australian that said children who volunteer before they turn 13 are almost 30 per cent less likely to have poor mental health in their teenage years. Which comes as no surprise ... we are more 'human' when we're other-centred, because at core we are relational beings. 'Self and other' is the irreducible unit of what it is to be, not 'me alone'. Volunteering is this idea actualised in practice, on behalf of the community.
May 21
The three-part documentary on the siege in Waco on Netflix is worth watching even you don't remember the shocking events of 1993. It's compelling viewing as a moment in history, but if you're interested in what happens to people when faith goes awry, it's about as good a piece of evidence as you'll get. Faith, hope and love are in perpetual motion, like a balanced spinning top. If any one of the three is skewed in the wrong way, the whole spinning top starts to wobble. In the case of the Branch Davidians cult, their faith was in leader David Koresh, who claimed to be Christ. With such a distorted understanding of identity, their experience of love included and embraced child abuse; their distorted sense of 'hope' became martyrdom. There was no sense of new creation or resurrection life, just an apocalyptic vision, nihilism and ultimately violence. But outside the compound, where the FBI was agitating to attack, the violence of the government response was no better.
May 24
There's a tonne of stories at the moment around artificial intelligence, and ChatGPT in particular. Among the ones that caught my eye this week were this from The Economist on Nvidia, the tech company that makes the chips that power AI: Nvidia capitalises on AI hype. The story was on the company's strong stock price because of the rapidly mounting interest in AI. You know something has really gripped the public imagination when it stimulates the stock market so robustly. A couple of days later, Nvidia was being touted as a trillion-dollar company, all on the back of AI demand: A.I. Demand Lifts Nvidia Toward Trillion-Dollar Valuation. At the same time, Microsoft was calling for more rules around AI to control its rise: Microsoft Calls for A.I. Rules to Minimize the Technology’s Risks. Is Microsoft truly concerned about the risks to humanity from AI? Or does Microsoft want a slice of the profits by controlling the commodification of AI? There was a separate story around the impact of ChatGPT on education in The Atlantic: The First Year of AI College Ends in Ruin.
From a faith, hope and love perspective, is AI good or bad? Like anything, it can be used for either. Personally, I don't think the panic is helpful, and neither is the attempt by the tech giants to control its growth so they can make mega-squillions from it. Any technology can be applied in a way that helps humanity see beyond the barbed wire of a self-condemning world to something better ... a more connected world, a more engaged community, a world that is using its creative genius on behalf of others. AI is that opportunity at this present moment. Here's a neat quote from The Atlantic story on education: "A student who engages with a chatbot is doing some kind of work for themselves—and learning how to live in the future." This appeals to me more than the idea of shutting it all down because of its ‘risks’. And this from another article in The Economist: What would humans do in a world of super-AI? The story links the rise of AI with a type of shared communal good that encourages the arts. I don't for a minute think humanity is wired to suddenly use AI altruistically, in a way that frees us up to explore our artistic sides. The way we missed that opportunity during the pandemic is a warning that our default position is not to think about the communal good. But hope would have us at least keep pushing towards it, and reflecting on how we can use technologies like AI to build better futures that resonate with a richer appreciation of why we’re here.
A different but related story emerged during the week about the US Surgeon General's concerns about the impact of social media on kids, such as this one from The Washington Post: What the surgeon general’s advisory says about social media for kids. Here's another from The Wall Street Journal on how concerned governments are trying to curtail social media’s impact: How Governments Are Trying to Keep Young Children Off Social Media, From Face Scans to ID Checks.
This is really a story about identity, relational engagement and the energy to be creative, or rather the loss of all three. Parents are now raising the alert about social media and its impact on children. But how much is it their (our) fault? Let's think about real engagement with our children, and how much we have used social media to babysit our kids because we have been otherwise distracted. As for creativity, have we taken our hands off the wheel in terms of showing kids all of what life can offer? In terms of identity, in order for a kid to have a strong sense of who they are, they need to be engaged in the stories that shape us well. Have we actually done that with our kids? Or have we let Instagram tell them who they are? Is it really any wonder our kids have looked to social media for their sense of belonging and purpose.
May 26
In US politics, Ron DeSantis finally announced he's running for the Republican nomination to vie for the presidency in 2024. Here's a good piece on DeSantis in The Economist: DeSantis is a truer believer, if a lesser politician, than Trump. This is good stuff, particularly as it explains how narrative is at the heart of the political divide in the US (as it is globally). Both sides want to control the narrative around culture, because they both understand how foundational it is for wielding power.
Mr DeSantis shares Mr Trump’s lack of humility but not his lack of discipline and understanding of government. A Harvard lawyer who served in Iraq and then for three terms in Congress, Mr DeSantis is the thinking Republican’s populist. He shares with progressives a conviction about the primacy of “narrative” in entrenching power. But he argues that the left has taken control of America’s core narratives through undemocratic means, by seizing cultural and corporate institutions, and is telling stories that warp young minds and curtail freedom. America’s institutions are not just corrupt; they are insidiously corrupting.
Faith has an alternative narrative to what's offered by either side of the current cultural and political divide. But if the faith community doesn't know that narrative is, it will find itself aligning with the narratives written by the political parties. What is the Christian narrative framed by faith, hope and love? It's this: all things have been reconciled to God in Jesus. That may mean nothing to you, and that's OK. What it's saying is that at a meta level, there's really no reason to camp on either side of a dividing wall, whether that dividing wall is political, sociological, or theological. The walls that divide us have been brought down, and we didn't, and don’t, have to do anything to achieve it. So while there is differentiation between cultures, genders, nationalities, experiences, there's also the freedom to experience love across those differentiations ... and there's also freedom to be creative (and yes, competitive) because hope reminds us that what differentiates us one from the other doesn't curtail our identities, our futures, or our capacity to love and be loved. The core narrative is no longer us versus them. It's I together with You, in rich, relational encounter.
May 26
Finally, a couple of interesting stories on how two cultures are combatting 'wokeism' from completely different perspectives, reminding us that the exclusion of 'the other' is the same whether it's perpetuated by the far right or the far left. First this one, from The Economist: China’s cancel culture is nationalist, not woke. The story is on China's efforts to shut down comedians who dare poke fun at the Chinese Communist Party. Then this one, from the US: Target’s surrender to MAGA rage shows how anti-wokeness really works. This is a story about how far right activists have forced Target to remove LGBTQ clothing displays from their stores. And also this one, in the New York Times, on the same topic: Brands Embracing Pride Month Confront a Volatile Political Climate.
Once again, the faith story is a counter narrative to the attempts on the left or the right to control the public space. Faith bows the kneee to no ideology, because it seeks to understand the human project not from the shadows of death (where everyone is blindly scrambling to preserve their own lives, even if that means destroying everyone else's) but in the light of love and hope. What does that mean? It means that I can have a strong sense of who I am, and also understand that you have a strong sense of who you are, but that doesn't have to result in us trying to wipe each other out. A strong sense of identity is actually a great foundation upon which to have a dialogue and seek to understand each other, so that together we can get creative and build roads that take us, and the rest of the community, forward.
A quick note
Thanks for coming on this journey. I hope to engage with the news again at the end of next week. In the meantime, I have some pieces on hope and happiness to publish mid-week. If you like what you've read and want to support my work, please consider the paid subscription option, which will open up the full library of articles that I've written, and give you access to mid-week newsletters that may or may not be for paid subscribers only. If you would like access to all those articles but the current cost of living is making that untenable for you, let me know and we can be creative about other options.
Cheers, David
This is a great way to begin my weekend. I have benefited from the challenge to my current understandings. Breaking down the walls.....what needs to divide us? Do we need to chose a side? It seems that life could be loved more easily. More simply. More openly. More of this please David. I want to understand more of this.