“The dominant trend of social thought in those years was toward individual self-expression and away from the group loyalty and deference that were the ideals in communities like St. Nick’s parish. Each person can and must find his or her own course to spiritual fulfillment, the educated-class writers were saying.” -pg 233
“The spiritual pluralist believers that the universe cannot be reduced to one natural order, one divine plan. Therefore, there cannot be one path to salvation. There are varieties of happiness, distinct moralities, and different ways to virtue. What’s more, no one ever really arrives at a complete answer to the deepest questions or to faith. It is a voyage. We are forever incomplete, making choices, exploring, creating, protean.” -pg 234
“All that is required is that people of good faith seek their own paths in an open and tolerant manner, without trying to impose their own paths on others.” -pg 235
“For example, Bellah and his crew interviewed a young nurse named Sheila Larson, who described her faith as “Sheilaism.” She had invented her own custom religion, with God defined as whatever fulfilled her needs.” -pg 236
“The generation that gave itself “unlimited choices” recoiled and found that it was still “searching for something.” In so many ways we seem to want to return to some lost age of (supposed) spiritual coherence and structure. We seem to sense the cost of our new-found freedom is a loss of connection to other people and true communities. We want to recreate those meaningful ligatures. And yet, more often than not, we’re not willing to actually go back to the age of limits, which would mean cutting off our options.” -pg 241
David Brooks does a good job depicting WHAT IS. A big gap exists between WHAT IS and WHAT OUGHT TO BE from my Christian perspective. Boiling it down to the simplest terms…The plurality of choices sought after is ultimately self-defeating. Nothing transcends the world of plurality subjective sameness worthy of full human devotion. The soul is left divided, continuing on a journey that only explores further into plurality, which never finds a concrete resting end. The Bobo culture craves a spirituality without a desire of obligation or singular commitment. It concocts a recipe incapable of satisfying the soul with a pluralistic smorgasbord of equal choices. When extrapolated out it tends to directionless living where passion for a singular unifying worldview is unheard of. The only direction is self-given, not transcendentally called.
