Public Theology

If paganism is a grand but dehumanizing value system, I’ve found it necessary, in this increasingly pagan age, to root myself in anything that feels rehumanizing, whether it’s art or literature or learning. I’ve found it incredibly replenishing to be spending time around selfless, humble people who are still doing the work of serving the homeless, mentoring a lost kid who’s joined a gang. These days I need these moral antidotes to feel healthy, resilient and inspired.

In his book “The Year of Our Lord 1943,” Alan Jacobs shows how many people during World War II felt the exact same impulse. With the bomb blasts of savagery growing greater in their ears, people like C.S. Lewis and the University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins recommitted themselves to humane education, to the task of raising generations that would never again fall for the strongman’s seductive promise of domination. That era eventually produced a golden age of public theology — Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King — and so much else.

— David Brooks, New York Times, 5.01.25