Deus Misereatur

  (This is from my letter to my congregation I sent out today, 30 August 2023) As one of my elders was leading us through Carl Trueman’s Strange New World in our adult class , I appreciated Trueman’s emphasis on community. And our discussions, especially the last two Sundays, were very fruitful as we thought out loud together about this subject. Therefore, I thought I would share something from David Brooks, an Op-ed columnist that leans into this discussion.   Brooks published a book in 2019 titled, “The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life”. In that work he was taking a gentle punch at destructive trends he has been seeing, and giving some helpful correctives. And so, he notes that “Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism” (34). He then shows how the loneliness and spiritual emptiness of individualism taken too far have become more prevalent in our time and the ways that they lead to very dark social consequences. These darker social consequences foster t...

  Clearly, David Brooks doesn’t need my evaluation of this book. And with 2,100 reviews on Goodreads and over 3,100 on Amazon, clearly you don’t either. So, quickly:  Of the 10 chapters, 8 are biographical - Dorothy Day, Augustine, General George Marshall, Philip Randolph, George Eliot, etc.  All are examined in the ways they built and bolstered their character, sometimes failing and picking themselves back up. Great stories, one and all. The first and final chapters are about the shift between the “Little Me” culture to the “Big Me” culture. It’s not a diatribe against the shift, as much as a series of observations, and how we can still build character in a world of “Big Me” without giving in to “Me”. I enjoyed the closing section, specifically the 15 Planks of his “Humility Code”. I think if more people took them seriously and embraced them - whether Boomers, GenX, Millennials, or GenZ - we’d see a different society and country. Further, it seems to me that Brooks is co...

The Second Mountain by David  Brooks My rating: 4 of 5 stars David Brooks, author, speaker, executive director of the Aspen Institute and launcher of the WEAVE program, has handed the American public something of a secular version of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes in his recently published "The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life". This 384 page hardback is clearly friendly to faith, family, community and conjugality. And it is filled with words from a man who has entered a new stage of life where he looks back over his years seeing that in some ways, much of it was vanity of vanities and chasing after the wind. Or, as he puts it, "For many, the big choices in life often aren't really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing" (108). But what matters most is enjoying your life, your wife, the sun and the night, the neighborhood wherein you live, and the people with whom you engage. But unlike Ecclesiastes,...