In a New York Times article, columnist David Brooks argues, "Religion my be in retreat, but guilt seems as powerfully present as ever." To make his point, Brooks quotes from a brilliant essay by Wlfred McClay called "The Strange Persistence of Guilt." Brooks writes:
Technology gives us power and power entails responsibility, and responsibility, McClay notes, leads to guilt: You and I see a picture of a starving child in Sudan and we know inwardly that we're not doing enough. "Whatever donation I make to a charitable organization, it can never be as much as I could have given. I can never diminish my carbon footprint enough, or give to the poor enough. … Colonialism, slavery, structural poverty, water pollution, deforestation—there's an endless list of items for which you and I can take the rap."
We're still shaped by religious categories and the need to feel morally justified, and yet here's the problem that Brooks identifies (and that the gospel addresses):
And yet we have no clear framework or set of rituals to guide us in our quest for goodness. Worse, people have a sense of guilt and sin, but no longer a sense that they live in a loving universe marked by divine mercy, grace and forgiveness. There is sin but no formula for redemption.
