Over the summer, I wrote a series of posts on how western culture has increasingly become dominated by highly distorted and deeply destructive narratives. Increasingly, these sobering words from the prophet Jeremiah describe our situation: “Everyone deceives his neighbor, and no one speaks the truth; they have taught their tongue
In the previous post I introduced a recent talk by Charles Chaput, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, on the church’s response to secularized culture. At the end of that post, I quoted Chaput as follows: Apostasy is an interesting word. It comes from the Greek verb apostanai – which means to revolt or
Last week, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput powerfully spoke about today’s secularized culture. His discourse at the University of Notre Dame 2016 Bishops’ Symposium is a must-read for all Christian leaders in America who desire to be salt and light at this challenging moment in our nation’s history. Following are excerpts
By Image taken from About.com, Fair use Followers of Jesus must have nothing to do with the creation and perpetuation of distorted narratives, for doing so runs counter to our core commitments. We are people of the truth. The dominant, postmodern culture rejects transcendent, objective reality and moral order—but we
In the previous article in this series, I spoke about pitfalls that the postmodern culture of narrative poses to faithful Christians. Another danger occurs when Christians fail to challenge the distorted morality of cultural narratives, but instead, ally themselves with the narrative’s supposed victims, while opposing and disparaging the supposed villains. This
The culture of narrative is both destructive and dangerous, and as Christians, we are not immune. All of us who live in the West inhabit a culture increasingly dominated by postmodern assumptions, which makes it easy for Christians to fall under the influence of powerful narratives, as I can personally
Galileo Galilei, father of modern science In this series, we’ve looked at a few examples of powerful narratives that gained significant cultural influence. In part two, I discussed how the teaching of American history has become dominated by a highly distorted narrative that paints European immigrants (largely white and Christian)
How are narratives being perpetuated today? Photo by The All-Nite Images In this series, we’ve been examining narratives: What they are, why they’ve become so pervasive, and why they are destructive—acting as a corrosive acid that eats away at the very pillars of a healthy, flourishing society. Narratives are
Healthy, flourishing societies are built on a foundation of truth. Not just truth in the ultimate sense, but truth in the everyday sense. There are facts in our daily existence which objectively exist, regardless of whether or not people believe them. As the common expression goes, “you are entitled to
Narratives are pervasive today because of a worldview shift to postmodernism. The concept of “narrative” we’ve been exploring in this series is not new, but today narratives have become commonplace. They are pervasive. You name the major issue of the day, whether it is global warming, or LGBT rights, or
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