Revenge filled the soul of the gunman who killed 5 people at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. A column reporting his criminal harassment of a woman over social media led Jarrod Ramos to sue the paper for defamation. He lost the case, lost an appeal, and yesterday made himself god over the lives of others. How much has changed in our lifetimes! A more litigious society than decades ago, social media non-existent decades ago, and mass shootings now sadly common.
Independence Day invites us to look back to the basic principles and way of life envisioned by the founding fathers. That can become nostalgic and paralyzing. “Our frustration is driven in part by a failure of diagnosis—a failure of self-knowledge, which in turn is rooted in a wide-spread nostalgia for midcentury America. That nostalgia therefore makes it difficult not only to see a path out of our economic and social challenges but also to see a way past our divisions and to recover some genuine unity amide our raucous, fractured diversity” (Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic, 185-186).
The basics haven’t changed over the years: Harassment and other crimes, anger, revenge, and so many other passions flooding into empty souls. The Ten Commandments are broken as much as ever. The epic confrontation was at the cross, sin and evil seemed to have won, until Easter. Can our nostalgia blind us to the relevancy and urgency of Christ’s mission today? Easter is both our personal encouragement and motivation for witness.
“Traditional religion offers a direct challenge to the ethic of the age of fracture. Religious commitments command us to a mixture of responsibility, sympathy, lawfulness, and righteousness that align our wants with our duties. They help form us to be free.” “Putting them (soul-forming institutions) within the reach of as many of our fellow citizens as possible must be among our highest and most pressing civic callings” (Levin, 204-205). “Let none hear you idly saying, ‘There is nothing I can do.’”
P.S. Diane and I are going to take the next few weeks off, recharging in the “lazy, hazy crazy days of summer.”