I recently wrote a guest post for Sue Vincent’s wonderful spiritual, art, and folklore site. My post focuses on a topic I find myself thinking about more and more:
Countless online and printed articles have wrestled with what has become the most troubling question of our age: What is happening to us?
The cascade of electrons and ink aimed at this question underscores our growing realization that many of the sources of order we once relied on, from governments to churches, are coming apart. Individuals are coming apart, too. Despite our material opulence and abundance of sexual choices, we’re depressed. People are increasingly alienated from each other, divorcing at record rates, and respond by insulating themselves in electronic diversions and pills. Many commentators have attempted explanations, but I think no one has attacked the question more directly and honestly than anthropologist Helen Fisher in this interview with Krista Tippett:
Ms. Tippett: Right. We don’t have those extended circles of people who know them.
Ms. Fisher: … Serial pair-bonding is probably basic to the human animal, series of partnerships. But what is really unusual, for me, is the loss of local community. We have extended communities — we have our internet friends; we’ve got our work friends; we’ve got our people who we exercise with; we’ve got people who we go to a poetry conference with — whatever it is. But we don’t have local community.
Read the rest at Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo.
M.C. Tuggle, Writer 
Excellent, true, troubling, enlightening… and more. Thank you, Mike.
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Jennie,
And a little bit hopeful as well. Thank you for the comment.
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Absolutely right! You are welcome, Mike.
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This is interesting Mike. I think I’d change religion to spirituality as the intersection. For a lot of reasons, I think religion has done more harm than good.
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K.E.,
There’s a world of difference between a faith that inspires us to better ourselves and one that commands us to enforce our beliefs on others.
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Exactly!
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We need a heart, not our own, not from another, but in the community we are living.
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