Wisdom on the Internet I

What should men do on the Internet?

Everyone knows what they actually do, and that we can’t do it. We should forget about porn. It should be boring. Why would brutalized, painted body parts lure us away from the body?

But I digress. What should we as Christian men do on the internet?

We must seek wisdom. If we don’t seek wisdom, we will drown in the sea of foolishness that laps at the shores of connectivity. Culture is religion externalized, and the internet is humanity digitized, magnified, and distorted as if viewed through a pair of heavy glasses. [The internet should be more connected to real human lives: Facebook is the start of a good thing.]

Our lives, our full lives, must be able to transfer to a new medium without losing their focus–that is the only way Christ’s holiness will inform our actions on the internet and it will become more than a tool that leads to sin for me and for many other men. In other words, Christians should seek wisdom on the internet and post wisdom on the internet, the kind of virulent wisdom that drives away foolishness. Maybe, perhaps, if we confront porn addicts on their home turf, if we hack porn sites and insert gospel popups, then we will be stepping in the right direction. I’m not advocating that, but a defensive posture in Internet holiness will only get us so far. The web is not a thing in itself, it is only us, in all our tawdry vainglory.

Let us redeem it. We are men, we are weak, our God is great, He will build us up for this task.

We can start by reading good blogs by good men.

Here are some blogs I frequent. I won’t give you a blurb about each, because I think you should explore them for yourself.

1. The Cedar Room.

2. Blog and Mablog.

3. Rod Dreher.

4. Peter Leithart.

5. Toby Sumpter.

6. Justin Taylor.

A Manifesto for Crunchy Conservatives

From one of my favorite books, Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. As a teenager, his book resonated with me as I sought to understand why my life looked so different from other Christian conservatives. This book is pure gold.

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.

Leithart: Marriage Exhortation

Dr. Peter Leithart is one of the wisest men I know.

“We always marry the wrong person.”  And if by chance you married the right person, “just give it some time and he or she will change” (Hauerwas).

We search the world for a partner to help us build a little kingdom where all our selfish dreams come to pass.  We want someone who will leave just as we are.  We want a spouse who adjusts without our having to make any adjustments.  We want the benefits of cohabitation while remaining essentially single.  We don’t want a husband or wife. We want to sit on the throne, and what we really want is a worshiper.

What we get instead is a spouse who prods and pokes and provokes and won’t let us be our old selves, those selves in whom we take so much delight and pride.  God doesn’t let us get away with our idolatry.  He didn’t design marriage for self-fulfillment, but to train you, slowly and painfully, to “love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married” (Hauerwas).

One way or the other, you are doing to die.  You can keep worshiping yourself and demand worship from your husband or wife, and that will be the death of your marriage.  Or you can kill your old self in faith that God will raise another self from the grave. Lent is for smashing idols.  To ensure a healthy marriage the first idol you have to smash is the one in the mirror.