Marginal Christianity

                                                                                   Branson Parler July 18, 2018                                                                                                                                                                Loneliness is on the rise. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among young people. Our social media networks may number in the hundreds, even thousands, but it appears that our actual social network is fraying. This social isolation was the main topic of the latest issue of Comment magazine , which explored the way that our families, friendships, churches, and cities all show increasing signs of this social isolation. While offering some diagnoses of what’s wrong and some signposts of hope, this collection of articles raises a deep question: what’s at the root of this social isolation? As we look at the symptoms, is there an underlying cause of this variegated and vicious disease?              

By Andrew Sullivan Earlier this week, I went to a lecture given by Steven Pinker on his latest book, Enlightenment Now . I’m a huge and longtime fan of Pinker’s, and his book The Blank Slate was, for me, a revelation. He’s become a deep and important critic of the visceral hostility to nature and science now so sadly prevalent on the left and right, a defender of reason and the Enlightenment against the “social justice” movements on campus, and his new book is a near-relentless defense of modernity. I sat there for an hour slowly being buried in a fast-accumulating snowdrift of irrefutable statistics showing human progress: the decline of violence and war, the rise and rise of democracy, the astonishing gains against poverty of the last couple of decades, the rise of tolerance and erosion of cruelty, lengthening lifespans, revolutions in health, huge increases in safety, and on and on. It was one emphatic graph after another that bludgeoned my current depression into a kind of