Gil Bailie

The new Yet Another Really Great Blog links to a recent speech by the Rene Girard scholar Gil Bailie in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, an event which gave "those sitting in safe, dry living rooms a rudimentary anthropological lesson in cultural fragility."

From Augustine to Toynbee and beyond, Christians have been keenly aware that human cultures come and go, succumbing more often than not to either hubris or moral decay or both. Such an anthropological long view, however, has never led Christians to think that one culture is as good as the next, or that all cultures were equally congenial to Christian existence or the Christian vocation. Their many pathologies notwithstanding, those cultures long influenced by Christianity are neither easy to come by nor likely to be replaced by something more propitious.

The idea of inevitable human progress has taken a beating in recent decades and in recent days, and it’s no doubt in for more. The idea was never more than a secular trivialization of Christian hope, and as the mounting evidence of our fallen condition undermines the idea, it will be up to Christians to revive the only hopeful alternative to it: namely, faith in God’s providence.

Some of the cultural Dr. Frankensteins may want, under the rubric of "sustainability," to take a new look at Pascal's Wager.

Comments

[Robert Godwin]

Bailie's book Violence Unveiled is chock-full of similarly luminous observations.