Evidence of God from miracles - Scientists please note!

Melissa Villalobos

When Christians meet the ideas of those who take an atheistic view of our nature and existence, they are often struck by the ignorance shown about religion. Those who decide to stand against the experience and depth of knowledge most humans in history and even now in believing in "another order, which goes beyond the proper domain of the natural sciences" (see #284 especially) seem to do so based on  a view of human life blinkered by scientific findings that they extrapolate from with a kind of glee - All the better for "hedonistic utilitarianism"? (Peter Singer's term).

I accept that outside mainstream Christian churches  there is little understanding: a) that the search for truth does not necessarily pit science against religion or vice-versa because "Truth cannot contradict Truth"; and b) that a wholly literal interpretation of Genesis is not accepted generally within the universal church. 

However, healing from a disease or disorder is an example of the types of miracles Christians encounter, of course bolstering our belief in God's providence and in His loving response to our prayers. Steven Pinker, however, would have none of it, in no instance, based on the thought that any miraculous outcome must arise from the "laws of probability [or] the workings of cognition". 

To the point: Last year, John Henry Newman was a declared a saint, someone who the church could accept had been received into heaven as a "true and faithful servant" of God. Christians have had, from the earliest days, the practice of praying to saints to ask they intercede on our behalf before God. (Some Protestants reject this belief). The reason why the church could accept the status of Newman, apart from the witness of a godly life, was that it had judged that two miracles had occurred at his intercession. In this case, a man with a disabling spinal problem (Jack Sullivan), and a woman who was at risk of losing a baby (Melissa Villalobos) had their plea to Newman for help answered by the power of God. 

I link here to a video and a recording involving Villalobos and Sullivan, both Americans, where they relate their dire predicament and the outcome, which their doctors could not explain on the basis of the medical situation of each.

The link is here: Enjoy, and pass on to others who are still intriqued by the wonderful things that occur in the world around us. These are kind of the events that those who try to use science as a rationale for their atheism should give attention to.

President Biden and the Common Good

President Biden used his inauguration address to stress that he understood the "fear and trepidation" that many Americans felt in looking to the future. The centrepiece of his message to the nation comprised these words:

But the answer is not to turn inward, to retreat into competing factions, distrusting those who don’t look like you do, or worship the way you do, or don’t get their news from the same sources you do.

We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.

We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts.

If we show a little tolerance and humility.

If we’re willing to stand in the other person’s shoes just for a moment.

Because here is the thing about life: There is no accounting for what fate will deal you.

There are some days when we need a hand.

There are other days when we’re called on to lend one.

          That is how we must be with one another.

President Biden on Inauguration Day.

That ethos of sharing with those in need, of being a brother or sister to those in need, of regarding the community as one entity and not a collection of individuals, is the spirit of what has been termed "the common good".

The United States, and much of the Western world, which suffers severely from personal alienation in society, and dispossession arising from a reluctance to help social classes that are struggling to cope with the upheaval in jobs and trade, and the burdens of the virus pandemic, need to avoid sinking into the pit of "competing factions" by getting wise about the boon that application of  the common good offers policy and political behaviour.

The wisdom of the universal church, infused by the Holy Spirit and painfully gained from its own experience as a governing state from time to time, but especially as a father-mother-advocate living in community with those without influence and power, balances the importance of the individual person with the well-being of the community, so that there is mutually supportive relationship. 

I want to draw on the clear exposition of the main features of the common good presented in a key article in an American journal appearing to coincide with the Biden inauguration. The article states: 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes well the church's teaching on the purpose of the government: "It is the role of the state to defend and promote the common good of civil society." Period. The government is not intended to prioritize "individual liberties" over communal flourishing, as so many right-leaning Americans wish, nor is the state intended by the church's teaching to be a hegemonic force for sectarian norms and partisan preferences.

According to the documents of the Second Vatican Council, which contains the most authoritative modern teaching on the subject: "It follows also that political authority, both in the community as such and in the representative bodies of the state, must always be exercised within the limits of the moral order and directed toward the common good — with a dynamic concept of that good — according to the juridical order legitimately established or due to be established" (Gaudium et Spes 1965).

What does the common good look like?

Drawing on the papal teaching from the preceding half century, the council explained that the common good is "the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment. Today [this] takes on an increasingly universal complexion and consequently involves rights and duties with respect to the whole human race. Every social group must take account of the needs and legitimate aspirations of other groups, and even of the general welfare of the entire human family" [Pacem in Terris 1963].

The catechism presents a digest of three key elements that combine to shape our understanding of the common good: respect for the human person, prioritization of collective social wellbeing and development, and the pursuit of peace.

The respect for the inherent dignity and value of the human person is not up for personal selection, choosing as one might which population, political party, class or race of people, gender or sexually oriented group one wishes to recognize. The church makes clear in Gaudium et Spes : "In our time a special obligation binds us to make ourselves the neighbor of every person without exception." 

The second element of the common good has to do with social well-being and development. The church teaches, in Gaudiem et Spes, that it is the government's responsibility in a healthy nation to make available to all people "everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter; the right to choose a state of life freely and to found a family, the right to education, to employment, to a good reputation, to respect, to appropriate information, to activity in accord with the upright norm of one's own conscience, to protection of privacy and rightful freedom even in matters religious."

Despite conservative cries for "smaller government," which is a self-interested red herring disingenuously presented as "fiscal responsibility," the church makes clear that it is precisely the responsibility of governments to attend to these basic needs of its people. And if there is a population whose interests should supersede others, the church has made abundantly clear that it promotes the preferential option for the poor and marginalized, not the wealthy, comfortable or socially ascendant.

Pope Francis's 2020 encyclical letter, Fratelli Tutti (All Brothers), “further builds on the church's rich, if challenging, teaching on the role of government. Critiquing the rise of extremism, false populism and divisive rhetoric, Francis writes: "Political life no longer has to do with healthy debates about long-term plans to improve people's lives and to advance the common good, but only with slick marketing techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others. In this craven exchange of charges and counter-charges, debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and confrontation."

Individualism, the ethos that has taken hold of society or is in the process of capturing the minds of the younger generation worldwide – also presents an obvious challenge to the wider community. The article quotes Pope Francis again from his encyclical on fraternity:

Individualism does not make us more free, more equal, more fraternal. The mere sum of individual interests is not capable of generating a better world for the whole human family. Nor can it save us from the many ills that are now increasingly globalized. Radical individualism is a virus that is extremely difficult to eliminate, for it is clever. It makes us believe that everything consists in giving free rein to our own ambitions, as if by pursuing ever-greater ambitions and creating safety nets we would somehow be serving the common good.

The common good, then, is achieved by addressing the needs of our neighbour. The outcome of peace in society is our reward, to use President Biden's words, if we "open our souls instead of hardening our hearts. If we show a little tolerance and humility. If we’re willing to stand in the other person’s shoes just for a moment." 

Further insights into the significance of the concept of the common good can be found on this blog here and here.

Let Christmas linger into the new year

 Christmas is an uplifting time of each year! Our focus is turned to a historical fact that has the meaning of love, faithfulness and self-sacrifice. There is a message in a person who has descended from a state of omniscience and omnipotence to become like all humans in an existence that is limited in most spheres of life.

Therefore, there is value in keeping before our eyes the important elements of the meaning of Christmas. This is what the early followers of Christ did, creating hymns and prayers, some of which have made their way down to us. I'm thinking of the hymns that Paul used in his letters, and there are the O Antiphons, advent prayers widely used in the church before the 8th Century. These prayers have given rise to chants and carols that have inspired the Christmas celebrations of people in subsequent centuries.

Below are slides that display how the heart of the early prayers have been incorporated into a Christmas carol that conveys delight at the gift that God has given us. At the end, are some links to videos I have been using to build my awareness of what Christmas means, and how that meaning has importance as I start this new year.

Christmas videos that have provided me with food for New Year prayer include these:

Traditional rendition of O Come O Come Emmanuel 

More forceful form of this prayer 

Then a beautiful insight into Mary's role as "God is born into the world of men" 

Finally, the lovely Wexford Carol -

"Good people all, this Christmas time,

  Consider well and bear in mind
  What our good God for us has done
  In sending His beloved Son"

Lyrics Source

Why evangelise? To free prisoners of the spirit!

The sharing of the Good News must go on. Here's why, according to Fr Frank Doyle S.J. in his commentary on Romans 6:12-18 in the Living Space website. He writes:

By Guiseppe Miro via Flickr

To have committed oneself to Christ totally must result in an inner transformation which steers us in the direction of goodness and love. To be in Christ is to be free, not freedom to sin but freedom not to sin. True freedom is the ability to choose the good; sin, as a choice of evil, can never be an expression of true freedom, it is an abuse of freedom.
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Paul develops the biblical ideas of ‘redemption’ and of liberation from death, and in order to bring out their implication makes frequent use of a metaphor that his contemporaries would find impressive: the slave redeemed and set free who can be a slave no longer but must serve his [or her] new master freely and faithfully. Christ has paid for our redemption with his life; and he has made us permanently free. The Christian must be careful not to let himself [or herself] be caught again by those who once owned him [or her], i.e. by sin; the Law, with its ritual observance; the principles of the world; and corruption.
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The word ‘obedience’ contains the root of the verb ‘to hear’. To turn a deaf ear to goodness and submit to evil leads to sin and death. To listen to the voice of goodness and submit to it is the way to life. We have a striking example in Jesus who, in obedience to his Father, offered up his whole body in life and in death for our liberation. Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are… and he was humbler yet, even submitting to death, death on a cross” (Phil 2:7-8).
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“Once you were slaves of sin, but thank God you have given whole-hearted obedience to the pattern of teaching to which you were introduced; and so, being freed from serving sin, you took uprightness as your master.” To give ‘whole-hearted’ obedience implies willing submission and not an obedience that is forced, imposed or legalistic.
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Christians have changed masters. From being slaves to sin, they have become slaves to ‘righteousness’, to that inner goodness that results from opening oneself to the love of God that comes through ‘grace’.
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When we surrender to a life of sin, we are headed for death [of our spirit, our humanness]. When we surrender ourselves to God it leads to justice, to goodness. Paradoxically to become the slave of “justice”, or righteousness, is to become free. Freedom, as we said, is the ability to identify totally with the good. To use one’s freedom to sin is a contradiction. And that is what true freedom enables us to do – to choose the good and loving act at all times and in every situation.
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Although some may not see it that way, there is no one who enjoys more real freedom than the one who is totally committed to [Jesus and] the Way of Jesus. [This is] because it is the Way, it is the Vision of life, to which we are called by the deepest needs of our being.

Read it all at: https://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/o1294r/

God as a trinity of persons

What can one say that is meaningful about such an abstract concept as the Holy Trinity? It was the great St Thomas Aquinas who said that it was much easier to say what God was not than what he is. In other words, every positive statement made about God has to be immediately denied. If we say God is “good”, it is obviously true but our concept of “goodness”, however exalted, is so limited that God’s “goodness” cannot be remotely described by our concept of it. And so of every other attribute applied to God.

So when it comes to speaking of the meaning and inner relationship of three “Persons” in one God we are floundering in territory where ordinary human language is totally inadequate to express the reality. Our God can only be reached in the “cloud of unknowing”, as Julian of Norwich so beautifully expressed it. God is not any of the things we say he is. It is, as Fr Anthony de Mello used to put it, something like trying to explain the colour green to a person who has been totally blind since birth.

Provided we are aware of God’s basic unknowability by our limited minds, there are still many helpful things we can consider about our God and the inner relationships which are part of his being.

While it is of the utmost importance that we realise this, there are many statements we can make which will help in our relationships with God.

To go back to Thomas Aquinas again, one of his basic principles was that “Behaviour is determined by the nature of things” (agere sequitur esse). From the way things act we know something about what they are. We can thus distinguish the different natures of minerals and other non-living substances, plant life, bacterial and viral life, animal life, human life from the different ways in which each is able to function and react.

We normally will not confuse a cow and a horse, a bird or a bat, a shark or a whale, a gorilla or a human being. It is not simply their appearances that are different. We realise that each has certain capabilities and that those capabilities arise from the way they are essentially constituted in their inner being. We don’t expect animals to talk as humans do, except in TV cartoons. We don’t expect snails to run in the Derby or the Grand National. Or tortoises to outstrip hares, except in fables.

And, in our daily rubbing shoulders with other people, the only way we can know them is by what they reveal of themselves through their behaviour and interactions. We say they ARE kind, because they consistently behave in a way that is kind. Or they ARE cruel, again because of what is perceived as consistently cruel behaviour. “By their fruits you will know them,” said Jesus. “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, or a bad tree good fruit” — because agere sequitur esse.

At the same time, while we may feel we can know a lot about people from their behaviour (and do not hesitate to pass judgement!), we can by no means know everything. Every human being, indeed as science constantly discovers, every created thing is a mystery whose innermost reality is really impossible for us to penetrate totally. And that even applies to our own selves. We do not know ourselves totally. We are a mystery to ourselves — and, a fortiori, to others!

If this is true of created reality, we should not be surprised to face the same dilemma with the Creator. God, in his deepest being, is a mystery we cannot ever fathom. This is not just a “cop out”; it is a fact. Nevertheless on the basis of what God DOES we do get some very clear indications of what he IS. Agere sequitur esse applies to God also.

What the Christian Testament tells us

And it is in the Christian Testament especially that we get the first hints of there being more than way of understanding God, although the full theology of the Trinity was only developed later. What it means to have three Persons in one Being is something we do not even try to understand. But we can get some inkling if we confine ourselves to seeing what each of the persons DOES as a clue to what they ARE.

In Greek classical drama in the time of Jesus and earlier, the actors put on a mask to indicate the role they were playing (not unlike the elaborate painting of the face in Chinese opera for the same purpose ). The Greek word for this mask was prosopon, literally, ‘in front of the face’, and the Latin translation was persona (‘per-sona’, that through which the sound of the voice came).

So, speaking analogically, we can say that in our God there are three masks, three personae, three roles pointing to three separate sources of action. This is not an explanation. It is a groping effort to get some understanding. Those three roles are that of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Father

We see God as Father, a loving and compassionate Father. Not a daunting patriarchal figure but one that is easily approached and who can be addressed by the familiar and intimate term “Abba” (compare the English ‘Papa’ or ‘Ah-Ba’ in Chinese and other languages). He is the Creator and giver of all life. Everything good that can be discerned in the world around us comes from him and through him. In him, through him and with him all things exist.

He is the one who cares, the one who waits for the Prodigal to return and forgives completely and immediately. He is the Father of truth, the Father of love and compassion, the Father of justice. The whole of this beautiful world in which we lives is a testimony and, at the same time, only a faint indication of what he really is. If we really look at the world he has made (and not at the one we have unmade), our hearts can only be overcome with praise and thanks.

Son

We see God as Son, who in an extraordinary way came to live among us, and whom, in a paradox beyond all understanding, we humans killed.

In the Son as a human being, we can see, hear and touch God. We see something of the nature of our God as Jesus heals the sick, identifies with the weak and socialises with the sinful. We see him challenge the dehumanising values that form the fabric of most of our lives and, in the process, he is rejected by those he loves. Though he is God, he empties himself of all human dignity that he might open for us the way to true and unending life.

Spirit

We see God as Spirit, becoming, as it were, the soul of his people. All the good that we do, all our evangelising work, our hospitals, schools, works of social development and social welfare, our care of the sick, the weak, the oppressed and the outcast — all are the work of God’s Spirit working in and through us. Wherever there is love there is the Spirit of God at work.

Models for our life

And yet, being aware of all this, we still cannot say that we know our God. But there is enough here — if we pray and reflect on it — that is already overpowering in its significance.

We need to remember that we have been called to be and to grow into the image of God himself. In what has been revealed to us through Jesus and the Scriptures, we have more than enough to challenge us and to help us to approach closer to our God. Our ultimate goal, and it is the only goal for all living, is to achieve perfect union with him. We do that, above all, by loving as he loved, by loving unconditionally and continuing to love where no love, and even hate, is returned.

For this we need the creative power of the Father, the compassion of the Son, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. They are all available to anyone who opens their heart to receive.

Written for Trinity Sunday by the late Frank Doyle, an Irish Jesuit priest of the Chinese Province.His commentary on the daily Mass readings can be found at https://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/

Loneliness and the death of the family

Staggering statistics and heart-breaking analysis from Kay Hymowitz, an American scholar and author on culture and family life. She writes in the Spring 2019 issue of City Journal:

Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness.

Kay S. Hymowitz

The number of people in the United States living alone has gone through the studio-apartment roof. A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement: “Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions.” Loneliness, public-health experts tell us, is killing as many people as obesity and smoking. It’s not much comfort that Americans are not, well, alone in this. Germans are lonely, the bon vivant French are lonely, and even the Scandinavians—the happiest people in the world, according to the UN’s World Happiness Report—are lonely, too. British prime minister Theresa May recently appointed a “Minister of Loneliness.”

The hard evidence for a loneliness epidemic admittedly has some issues. How is loneliness different from depression? How much do living alone and loneliness overlap? Do social scientists know how to compare today’s misery with that in, say, the mid-twentieth century, a period that produced prominent books like The Lonely Crowd? Certainly, some voguish explanations for the crisis should raise skepticism: among the recent suspects are favorite villains like social media, technology, discrimination, genetic bad luck, and neoliberalism.

Still, the loneliness thesis taps into a widespread intuition of something true and real and grave. Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers of “deaths of despair” suggest a profound, collective discontent. It’s worth mapping out one major cause that is simultaneously so obvious and so uncomfortable that loneliness observers tend to mention it only in passing. I’m talking, of course, about family breakdown. At this point, the consequences of family volatility are an evergreen topic when it comes to children; this remains the subject of countless papers and conferences. Now, we should take account of how deeply the changes in family life of the past 50-odd years are intertwined with the flagging well-being of so many adults and communities.

Scholars sometimes refer to the domestic earthquake that first rumbled through wealthy countries like the U.S. in the mid-twentieth century as the Second Demographic Transition. (The first transition occurred around the time of the Industrial Revolution, as the high death and birth rates that had been humanity’s default condition since the Neanderthals declined dramatically, leading to rapid population growth.) Mostly associated with the Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, the SDT (the unfortunately evocative acronym) is a useful framework for understanding the dramatic rupture between the Ozzie and Harriet and Sex and the City eras.

The SDT began emerging in the West after World War II. As societies became richer and goods cheaper and more plentiful, people no longer had to rely on traditional families to afford basic needs like food and shelter. They could look up the Maslovian ladder toward “post-material” goods: self-fulfillment, exotic and erotic experiences, expressive work, education. Values changed to facilitate these goals. People in wealthy countries became more anti-authoritarian, more critical of traditional rules and roles, and more dedicated to individual expression and choice. With the help of the birth-control pill, “non-conventional household formation” (divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, and single parenthood) went from uncommon—for some, even shameful—to mundane. Lesthaeghe predicted that low fertility would also be part of the SDT package, as families grew less central. And low fertility, he suggested, would have thorny repercussions for nation-states: he was one of the first to guess that developed countries would turn to immigrants to restock their aging populations, as native-born young adults found more fulfilling things to do than clean up after babies or cook dinner for sullen adolescents.

The disruption of family life caused by the SDT in the U.S. has been rehearsed thousands of times, including by this writer, but the numbers still startle. In 1950, 20 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, it’s approximately 40 percent. Four in ten American children are now born to unmarried mothers, up from about 5 percent in 1960. In 1970, 84 percent of U.S. children spent their entire childhoods living with both bio-parents. Today, only half can expect to do the same.

Read on for further light on the dis-ease afflicting citizens of much of the world,  who are choking on the fruit of several layers of self-deception within society that have their origins in changes in lifestyle, moral beliefs and life goals.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a City Journal contributing editor, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys.

Science limps as religion steps up - delusion vs. insight

Chris Arnade is an American freelance writer and photographer. Over several years he has explored the underbelly of the United States, having quit his job as one of Wall Street's elite in response to his disquiet over the growing divide within his homeland. He has just had his collection of essays and photographs published as Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.

This divide is what prompted Arnade, who has a Ph.D in physics, to explore beyond his normal boundaries.Speaking of his former environment,  he states: "Our isolation from the bulk of the

Chris Arnade...surprised where faith flourished

country left us with a narrow view of the world. We valued what we could measure, and that meant material wealth. Things that couldn’t be measured—community, ­dignity, faith, happiness—were largely ignored because they were hard to see, especially from so far away."

With the insights earned through his meeting the 'strangers' even in his own New York, Arnade reflects on his past. While he was at college, he worked in a painting gang with Preacher Man and they had a difference of view over the Bible: "His intolerance simply didn’t fit my intolerance. My intolerance was credential-based." Arnade continues:

"When I look back now at Preacher Man and the others praying, I see people striving for dignity in a harsh world. I see mothers working minimum-wage jobs, trying to raise three children alone. I see a teenager fingering a small cross and a young woman abused by an addict father. I see Preacher Man living across the tracks in a beat-up shotgun shack, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little. Their faith may not be true, I tell myself, but it is useful."

Arnade writes: "During my years on Wall Street, I argued for policies based on data. I thought we should focus on things that could be quantified—like higher profits and greater economic growth. I measured success by how high the stock market was or whether we had maximized profits and minimized expenses, not by whether we had done the right thing.

"I was not alone. Most of us in the front row had decided that it was impossible to identify absolutes, that moral certainties were suspect, and that all that we could know or value was what science revealed to be quantifiable. Religion was an old, irrational thing that limited and repressed people—and often outright oppressed them." Therefore:

 "When I first went to the Bronx, I expected that the people there, those most affected by the coldness and ruthlessness of the world, would share my atheism. Instead, I found a strong belief in the supernatural, and a faith that manifested in many ways, mostly as a belief in the Bible.

"Everyone I met there who was living homeless or battling an addiction held a deep faith. Street walking is stunningly dangerous work, and everyone has stories of being cut, attacked, and threatened, or stories of others who were killed. Everyone has to deal with the danger. Few work without a mix of heroin, Xanax, or crack. None without faith. 'You know what kept me through all that? God. Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.'

"There are dirty Bibles in crack houses, Qur’ans in abandoned buildings. There is a picture of the Last Supper that moves with a couple living on the streets. Rosaries, crucifixes, and religious icons are worn for protection and good luck. Pages of the Bible are torn out, folded up, and kept in pockets, to be pulled out and fingered nervously, or read over in times of stress, or held during prayers."

Of note is this fact: "Mixed with faith in God is a strong belief in the reality of evil. Crossing the bridge into Hunts Point, ­Takeesha [a prostitute friend] looks out the window of my van. 'This place is so bad and evil. It’s, like, so simple to walk across the bridge, but it’s like you can’t go across, you understand? This place is evil. It’s possessed. It’s evil. I been here a long time. There are bad spirits here. I have seen good people, I have seen people that have family, jobs, and they come here and they get dug in, and two weeks later they living in a cardboard box.' "

Arnade comes to this conclusion: "When you’re up against evil, whether the mysterious efforts of demons or the all-too-explainable effects of drugs, the world of science, education, and smart arguments doesn’t do much for you[...]. All that the front row offers to those living shattered lives in broken buildings is sterile institutions that chew them up and then spit them out."

A further insight is this: "For many back row Americans, the only places that regularly treat them like humans are churches. The churches are everywhere, small churches that have come in and taken over a space and light it up on Sundays and Wednesdays. They walk inside the church, and immediately they meet people who get them."

Although there are rules: "They say, 'Enter as you are,' letting forgiveness wash away a past that many want gone. You are welcome as long as you try. The churches understand the streets, understand everyone is a sinner and everyone fails. The rest of the world [...] doesn’t understand that. That cold, secular world of the well-intentioned is a distant and judgmental thing.

"The churches are also the way out of addiction, a way to end the cycle. The few success stories told on the streets are of relatives, friends, or spouses who found God, got with the discipline and order of a church, and moved away."

For me, the next section is a powerful statement of what I believe will take the post-Christian society many years to discover, making Arnade's new book (see below) all the more insightful and therefore of high value. The section is given in full:

"When I walked into the Bronx I was an atheist. It was something I was sure about. After years of traveling America, I wasn’t so sure. To my educated lifelong friends, I might have said I was agnostic, or still an atheist, but one who appreciated religion.

"To the believers I met I would say, 'I appreciate the power of faith,' or 'I understand the power of the Bible.' To the more direct and blunt questions, 'Yes I read the Bible now and then, but I wouldn’t call myself religious,' or, 'I have not been saved, but I do read the Bible.'

"None of it was a lie, but the more direct truth was that even after I had come to see how useful religion was, I still attended services as an outsider trying to understand why faith drew so many people to it. Why it seemed to comfort those who needed it the most. In the language of the church, I wasn’t yet saved. In the language of my friends, I was a scientist trying to understand religion.

"I could no longer ignore the value of faith, not as a scientist, not as a person who claimed to want to learn from others. Yet I still saw it as a utility—something popular because it worked. Still, after attending hundreds of different services I was beginning to realize there was more to it than that. My biases were limiting a deeper understanding: that perhaps religion was right, or at least as right as anything could be. Getting there required a level of intellectual humility that I was not sure I had.

"Like most in the front row, I am used to thinking we have all the answers. On Wall Street, there were few problems we couldn’t solve with enough smarts, energy, audacity, or money. We even managed to push death into the distance; with enough research and enough resources—eating right, doing the right things, going to the correct medical specialist—the inevitable could be delayed, and mortality could feel distant.

"With a great job and a great apartment in a great neighborhood, it is easy to feel we have nothing for which we need to be absolved. The fundamental fallibility of humans seems outdated, distant. It’s not hard to imagine that you have everything under control.

"On the streets, few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that we don’t and never will have this under control. It is far easier to see religion not just as useful, but as true."

This piece is an edited version of an excerpt from Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade, published on June 4, 2019, by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House. Read the full excerpt at First Things.