Seasoned Veracity

Global Day of Prayer

This Sunday, May 27, is Pentecost Sunday. It is also the Global Day of Prayer, on which churches around the globe are encouraged to unite in prayer for the world. 

Let us join together in prayer for a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit on us, and on our desperately needy world. 

For more information, as well as resources to aid in observing the Global Day of Prayer, go here.

 

Equality in Marriage

One sure way to wreck a marriage is to insist on dividing everything equally: income, household duties, child care. That actually sounds more like a divorce. Only when the partners are fully in debt to each other do they become something more than partners, and equality is the least of their concerns.

 -- Janie B. Cheaney

Young and Old in Japan

According to recently released government data, the number of children under 15 years of age in Japan has fallen to an estimated 16.65 million, a drop of 120,000 from last year. This is the 31st consecutive yearly drop, and the lowest number since data began to be tracked in 1950.

Children account for 13 percent of the nation's population, the lowest percentage among  countries with a population of 40 million or more. In contrast, seniors aged 65 and over account for 23 percent of Japan's population. 

Contemplating Suicide

According to a government survey, these are the percentages of age cohorts in Japan that admit to having seriously considered killing themselves:

• People in their 70's, 15.7%
• People in their 60's, 20.4%
• People in their 50's, 25.7%
• People in their 40's, 27.3%
• People in their 30's, 25%
• Highest of all: among Japanese people in their 20's, 28.4% have seriously considered committing suicide

Marriage in Japan

In 1980, percentage of Japanese who reached age 50 without getting married:

• women, 4.5%
• men, 2.6%

In 2010:

• women, 10.6%
• men, 20.1%

A Grave Offense

Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusions of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. 

 -- Catechism of the Catholic Church

Facebook, Loneliness, Narcissism and Solitude

Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

Various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness.

Being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you’re lonely, you’re more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You’re less likely to exercise. You’re more likely to be obese. You’re less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline.

Do social networking sites such as Facebook contribute to the problem of loneliness, or help to combat it? Research shows that for the most part,  people are bringing their old friends, and feelings of loneliness or connectedness, to Facebook. The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another.

However, the capacity of Facebook to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is worrisome. Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.” Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.

Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT, is skeptical about the effects of online society in her 2011 book, Alone Together: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.” The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy,” she writes. “We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.’”

Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation. The Australian study “Who Uses Facebook?” found a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism: “Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers,” the study’s authors wrote. “In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual’s need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior.”

A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. What’s truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume—750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend—but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee.

What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

 -- Stephen Marche, excerpted from The Atlantic

Risky Business

Excerpts from an interview with business expert Jim Gilmore:

Business is the most corrupting influence on the visible church today... The church is to stand apart from the marketplace. The church is not a business; she should sell no economic offerings. In an age when more and more of life is being commodified -- we are going beyond just the buying and selling of goods and services and now charging for life experiences and personal transformations -- the church needs to refrain from participating in this activity. 

The church and pastors are not here to help improve peoples' lives. Leave that for the marketplace and private charity. No, they're here to provoke people into understanding the need to die to self and to be found in Christ. No orchestrated experience can substitute for good old fashioned preaching of the gospel.

The church exists to proclaim the gospel: to preach the Word, to administer the sacraments, to exercise proper church discipline. And that's about it. The rest we should do as private individuals and in collective efforts with others outside of church.

To the extent that the church does not know its Bible, really know the Bible, the more it seeks distraction in terms of participating in other ministries and making junkets to ministry conferences.

"Ministry" in the church should not be singled out as distinct from other vocations in terms of being ministry. We do a great disservice when we treat those who do not hold positions in the church as somehow not equally called to ministry. We set up a false sense of guilt. Worse, we end up with some of the most unqualified men in the pulpit.

Labor where God has placed you. How should one relate to the world? Don't develop grandiose schemes for greatness, just labor where God has placed you. Don't do some rain dance; dig some ditches.

The full interview can be found at Out of Ur

Worldliness Today

In his book The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist, sociologist Craig Gay asserts that we modern people "are for the most part tempted to go about our daily business in this world without giving God much thought."

God does not matter practically -- in the practices of everyday life -- because the chief end of man in modernity is the maintenance of control over reality, and we can adequately achieve such dominance through science and technology. Religion is assumed to be helpful for private life, for directing our personal inner worlds. But when it comes to defining how we deal with the external world -- in political, economic, commercial, medical, and other social contexts -- we can safely set God-talk aside and focus on technique.

The tendency toward practical atheism is not principally a matter of post-Christian ideas or arguments circulating in the media, higher education, or popular culture, but the intuitively assumed posture of all those participating in modern social structures.

Gay frames this problem in the biblical language of worldliness: "What if the essence of 'the world' -- and hence of worldliness -- is not personal immorality and/or social injustice as such, but is instead an interpretation of reality that essentially excludes the reality of God from the business of life?"

  -- Ken Myers in Touchstone

Be Fruitful and Multiply

The early Christians proved to be remarkably fruitful. While their pagan Roman neighbors practiced contraception, abortion, and infanticide, allowed for easy divorce, and had a preponderance of males (due to female infanticide) the new Christian movement strongly opposed abortion and infanticide, discouraged birth control and divorce, and had a high proportion of members who were women in their fertile years. 

Attention to the fertility effects of religious faith has been revived in recent months by Eric Kaufmann's book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. Kaufmann describes himself as a secular liberal, but argues that "religious fundamentalists are on the course to take over the world through demography." He defines "fundamentalist" broadly enough to include Jews, Christians, and Muslims around the globe who take their beliefs seriously enough to allow scriptural teachings on marriage and procreation to influence their behavior.

With fertility rates of between four and nine children born per woman, and in the general context of tumbling global fertility, these groups are already expanding their size relative to the earth's population. If compounded over another four generations, the transformation would be staggering.

Says Kaufmann, "We have embarked on a particularly turbulent phase of history in which the frailty of secular liberalism will grow ever more apparent... This much seems certain: without [a new secular] ideology to inspire social cohesion, fundamentalism cannot be stopped. The religious shall inherit the earth."

  -- Allan Carlson in Touchstone