Marginal Christianity

David Brooks JAN. 12, 2015 Maybe you’re familiar with Ursula Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It’s about a sweet and peaceful city with lovely parks and delightful music. The people in the city are genuinely happy. They enjoy their handsome buildings and a “magnificent” farmers’ market. Le Guin describes a festival day with delicious beer and horse races: “An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute.” It is an idyllic, magical place. But then Le Guin describes one more feature of Omelas. In the basement of one of the buildings, there is a small broom-closet-sized room with a locked door and no windows. A small child is locked inside the room. It looks about 6, but, actually, the child is nearly 10. “It is feeblemind...

http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/4165/faithful-compromise/ Compromise has increasingly been a lost art in our public life as we have come to prize ideological purity over brokered effectiveness. February 27, 2014 - By James K.A. Smith "Faithful witness is an abstract ideal, which can take no form in the world as it is; compromise, therefore, is the law of our being, and no-one, not even Jesus himself, can get by without striking bargains."   Many of us will be both puzzled and disturbed by this provocative claim from ethicist and theologian Oliver O'Donovan. It counters our gut-level intuitions and also runs counter to the spirit of the age in which "compromise" is a dirty word. For Christians, the word evokes a sense of capitulation or assimilation, the sort of "friendship with the world" that James describes as "enmity with God" (James 4:4). To compromise is to give up and give in, to abandon one's pr...