A recent article, “A Thoughtless Age,” by David P. Goldman, contemplates what has been lost from our culture.
This paragraph reminded me a bit of extended family gatherings when I was growing up. . . just a bit.
“The last place where literature is read closely by a non-specialist public might be the Orthodox Synagogue, where the Hebrew Bible is examined through the eyes of ancient as well as medieval and modern commentators. It is read not as literature but as family history, and its readers have an existential interest in the result. The Hebrew Bible, to be sure, is not all of literature, but it is the best of it (nothing in Greek or Latin compares to the grandeur of Isaiah). Most of all, it is the continuing concern of a living community which has read it together for thousands of years.”
A bunch of Baptists gathering together, talking family, current events and scripture might not be an Orthodox Synagogue, but it used to be similar. Notsomuch nowadays. . . But real questions about our place in God’s creation were at least on the table, and considered in light of the “great literature” of The Bible, literature that compasses the whole of human experience and as much of divine transcendence as can be contained in the words of men.
“As long as the ambient culture runs from the existential questions brought forth by religion, and as long as the religious public contents itself with the pap of popular culture, we will be shut off from access to the great works of the past.”