It is really impossible to have a flourishing Christianity without the humanities. It is equally impossible to have a flourishing humanities without Christianity as an anchor.
(Brad Birzer paraphrasing T.S. Elliot. No link. It’s a lecture MP3 I picked up somewhere.)
Congratulations to the good folks of Saranac Lake, New York, who lost their only department store in 2002, got tired of driving 50 miles for stuff, but still said no to WalMart.
[R]ather than accept their fate, residents of Saranac Lake did something unusual: they decided to raise capital to open their own department store. Shares in the store, priced at $100 each, were marketed to local residents as a way to “take control of our future and help our community,” said Melinda Little, a Saranac Lake resident who has been involved in the effort from the start. “The idea was, this is an investment in the community as well as the store.”
It took nearly five years — the recession added to the challenge — but the organizers reached their $500,000 goal last spring. By then, some 600 people had chipped in an average of $800 each. And so, on Oct. 29, as an early winter storm threatened the region, the Saranac Lake Community Store opened its doors to the public for the first time. By 9:30 in the morning, the store, in a former restaurant space on Main Street opposite the Hotel Saranac, was packed with shoppers, well-wishers and the curious.
The 4,000-square-foot space was not completely renovated — a home goods section will be ready for the grand opening on Nov. 19 — but shoppers seemed pleased with the mix of apparel, bedding and craft supplies for sale …
Think of it as the retail equivalent of the Green Bay Packers — a department store owned by its customers that will not pick up and leave when a better opportunity comes along or a corporate parent takes on too much debt.
A Town Creates Its Own Department Store (HT Distributist Review on Facebook).
I glanced at this Saturday, but didn’t dig in until my cyberbuddy John posted on it.
I don’t know why I skipped it, since I admire Harold Bloom, the author, and he wasted no time before committing two most salutary truths:
Mr. Romney, earnest and staid, who is deep within the labyrinthine Mormon hierarchy, is directly descended from an early follower of the founding prophet Joseph Smith, whose highly original revelation was as much a departure from historical Christianity as Islam was and is. But then, so in fact are most manifestations of what is now called religion in the United States, including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God Pentecostalists and even our mainline Protestant denominations.
My friends from long ago will tend to cheer the first sentence while dismissing the latter. I struggle with how to live in the recognition that both are true.
Yet there remains – at least among the folks involved in “most manifestations of what is now called religion” – scattered souls who intend to be, and think they are, practicing stripped-down, bare-bones, historic Christianity. Bloom is having none of it:
Persuasively redefining Christianity has been a pastime through the ages, yet the American difference is brazen. What I call the American Religion, and by that I mean nearly all religions in this country, socially manifests itself as the Emancipation of Selfishness …
I recall prophesying in 1992 that by 2020 Mormonism could become the dominant religion of the western United States. But we are not going to see that large a transformation. I went wrong because the last two decades have witnessed the deliberate dwindling of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into just one more Protestant sect.
(Hyperlink added)
The redefinition pastime continues. If you wish, you can get ministry credentials online and then use them to redefine Christianity yourself. I’m assuming it was not accidental, though it was ironic, that this ad for Nazarene Bible College, in Colorado Springs and cyberspace, appeared in the margins of Bloom’s NYT piece:
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Bon appetit!
Having become tedious even to myself, I’m Tweeting more, blogging less. View this in a browser instead of an RSS feeder to see Tweets at upper right.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 