From the virgin birth to the death conquering death of Christ, the Christian faith is a religion of ironies, historical and spiritual. Maybe one of them is precisely that the spiritual is the historical, that the physical is the locus of the spiritual.
Next year, our conference will be a contemplation of humor. Certainly, we’ll need to draw on this rich tradition of Christian irony to really explore this theme.
It’s distressing how unironic, unliterary, the modern mind has become. As I expressed it in a letter to a potential speaker for next year: “We’ll spend a lot of time thinking about the ironies of the Christian faith and of education: you know, dying to live, joyful repentence, submission as the means to liberty, etc. Gosh, the modern mind is so blasted unliterary since it lost its faith. How can we get the sciences to wake up and smell the irony?”
We’re so darn serious. We won’t let anybody take advantage of us – that’s at the root of the destruction of marriage in the west. We won’t submit to unkind masters. We won’t apologize or repent. The result?
We’re miserable, isolated, lonely people.
The solution?
Divine Comedy.
