An important piece by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt arguing that the relationship between the rise of social media and increasing mental illness in teenage girls is not simply a matter of correlation but causation. It’s worth the ten minutes it takes to read.
All posts by Robert Dean
A Sermon for Black History Month
Below is a recording of a sermon I preached this past Sunday at Prairie Presbyterian Church. My text was John 3:1-21. As I was working on the sermon, I began to notice interesting connections between the story of Nicodemus’s encounter with Jesus and our current cultural struggles surrounding race in North America. The fact that I’ve been reading Jonathan Tran’s insightful book, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, is also surely a contributing factor. The first part of the sermon is sure to aggravate cultural warriors on the left and the right, but I do think the second half gestures towards a more distinctive Christian approach to this set of problems. Continue reading A Sermon for Black History Month
Root on Transformation vs. Change
“Modernity,” according to Root, “is the constant process of speeding things up.”1 Under the accelerating forces of modernity, human beings and communities are constantly scrambling to keep up with the rapid rate of change, leading to increasing levels of anxiety and depression. Root illuminatingly contrasts change with transformation: Continue reading Root on Transformation vs. Change
- Andrew Root, The Church in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2021), 14. ↩
Performance of Identity
I had a wonderful week last week with the Doctor of Ministry cohort at Providence Theological Seminary teaching a course called, “Thinking and Interpreting Theologically.” The students read several insightful texts in preparation for our time together. The one that seemed to generate the most conversation was Andrew Root’s The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life (Baker, 2021). It is the third volume in Root’s Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy. In the trilogy Root is dialoguing with the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in particular Taylor’s seminal A Secular Age. At the heart of Root’s project is the concern for developing ways for Christians to speak about and recognize the presence of divine action within the midst of a “social imaginary” that has reduced its vision to the “immanent frame.”1 Continue reading Performance of Identity
- These are terms Taylor introduces in A Secular Age. I briefly engage with Taylor around some of these themes in For the Life of the World (215-216). ↩
A Voice of Sanity
I’ve just ordered Jonathan Tran’s new book, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism after listening to a conversation between him and the guys at the Crackers and Grape Juice podcast. I’ve appreciated Tran’s past work (particularly The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory) and there is an essay co-authored by Tran and Hauerwas in Minding the Web, but I was especially struck in this conversation by how Tran is providing a much needed theological voice of sanity in the midst of contemporary struggles surrounding race. Continue reading A Voice of Sanity
Living within the Mystery of God
An arresting passage from Fritz Bauerschmidt’s sermon for the Baptism of the Lord entitled, “Hope for Everything,” found in his book How Beautiful the World Could Be: Christian Reflections on the Everyday. Continue reading Living within the Mystery of God