The Top 5: Tim Keller, San Francisco, Spiritual Renaissance
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Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation! Please also consider becoming a paid subscriber if this is one of those newsletters you open up all the time or look forward to each week.
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The Far-Seeing Faith of Tim Keller” (New Yorker)
Because this is a stellar contribution to the reflections on Pastor Tim Keller’s life and legacy.
“Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop” (Curbed - New York Magazine)
Because we hear a lot about San Francisco — its problems with homelessness, housing prices, and violence — in the news. Elizabeth Weil writes, “When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall.”
“Why Some Companies Are Saying ‘Diversity and Belonging’ Instead of ‘Diversity and Inclusion’” (NYT)
Because “The belonging obsession is the result of a now-widespread corporate standard: Bring your whole self to work. If you have the flexibility to work wherever you want, and the freedom to discuss the social and political issues that matter to you, then ideally, you’ll feel that you belong at your company.”
“The Left Needs a Spiritual Renaissance. So Does America.” (Daily Beast)
Because Ian Marcus Corbin and Senator Chris Murphy call for a renewal of American left through the embracing of spiritual roots and values. “King rooted all of his advocacy from his perspective as a Baptist preacher; Kennedy and Chavez grounded their passionate campaigns for justice in their Catholicism, and, of course, there is no way to separate Gandhi’s liberation politics from his Hinduism. Theirs was a politics imbued with an innate and insatiable hunger for universal justice and solidarity, grounded in a deep spiritual vision—the kind of thing that one might be willing to live for, or even die for.”
“Rational Magic” (The New Atlantis)
Because “Whether you call it spiritual hunger, reactionary atavism, or postliberal epistemology, more and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers (and would-be thinkers) are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology — that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so — is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism. We’ve run up against the limits — political, cultural, and social alike — of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost — a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent — must be restored.”
ICYMI on Wear We Are:
Episode 66: Talking Evangelicals & 2024 with Journalist Jon Ward
The Morning Five: May 15, 2023
The Morning Five: May 16, 2023
I think I like the language of belonging, but as a manager to a small research team at a university the idea of everyone bringing their whole selves to work leaves me wondering if we would have enough time left to actually get our work done (if we all did that). Plus, people would be variably comfortable with bringing themselves all into the open so you could still end up with some being more “dominant.”