2 of 5
So one can affirm the works of human beings and the creative spark we bring to the most utilitarian crafts and activities. Nor can one neglect the institutions human beings have built in order to sustain a way of life in common together. Amor mundi—love of the world—is surely a Christian way of being in the world, so long as it is tempered by a recognition of that beyond the world as we know it, that which claims us and names us "Christian."
Yet contra mundum is also part and parcel of Christ as transformer of culture, so long as this does not become a hardened ideological stance of opposition, an exaltation of grumpiness as a rarified norm, when it is merely the burnishing of contempt. There is in fact much to oppose. If we frame matters with an eye to the ultimate as well as the penultimate, the here and now, we will be able to assay matters critically, and ultimately be able to offer an alternative.
Let's take two items ripped from today's headlines, as we say, the first from an article in The New York Times of June 6, 2006. The article informs us of the startling and alarming fact that the use of antipsychotics by young people in the United States rose fivefold in one decade. Unless American children are suddenly being overtaken by psychoses, this datum calls for sober analysis and criticism. What does this medicalization of childhood portend? How does one explain it? What should we do about it? The cultural boosters will appear before us decked out in sunny hues and tell us that the feeding of anti-psychotic drugs to America's children arises from ever more vigilant care and attunement to the needs of the young. But we cannot take that at face value. Medicine does not exist in a cordon sanitaire free from the influences of economic and cultural forces. What are the problems being treated? "Aggression" and "mood swings," we are told, in addition to that old standby "attention deficit disorder."
Such a basic piece of cultural information matters to a Christian believer. To embrace the Christ who is both with and against culture, hence the affirmer and critic and transformer of culture, is to be particularly attuned to a culture's children, all of them children of God, beings of inestimable worth. It is also to become attuned to their complexity and diversity—not primarily the bean-counting diversity that currently prevails but rather the diverse gifts and qualities that distinguish one child from another, even in the same family. How can we nourish these qualities? How can we control those attributes that are self- or other-destructive? This leads us straight to questions of cultural and religious formation.
For our cultural milieu is one in which the norm is both parents working outside the home, exhausted and busy. It values success and drivenness, measuring success through monetary reward. It glamorizes celebrity and ignores the hard work people do every day to raise children and sustain neighborhoods, to make life less brutal and more decent and kind. It is a milieu of pervasive family fragmentation if not outright breakdown, to which many children respond with anger and "acting out." In this milieu every personal question, and many public questions, are medicalized and psychologized; new drugs are touted not only to the public but to the medical profession via lavish marketing stratagems and budgets.
share this page
RSS Feed
