TaxProf Blog: Tish Harrison Warren’s Final New York Times Faith Column: My Hope For American Discourse

Yet there is danger in becoming a pundit, particularly on matters of faith and spirituality. It can be deadening. I plan to continue to write about faith, to explore its impact on politics, study it sociologically, think about its metaphors and claims of truth. But for any person of faith, public engagement must be balanced with times of withdrawal, of silence, prayer, questioning and wonder beyond the reach of words. Otherwise, faith with all its strange and startling topology becomes a flat and sterile thing, something to be dissected, instead of embraced. And typically once something is fit only for dissection, it is dead. I bring this up because it is a temptation for all of us now. Social media and digital technology have made us all pundits. We are faced with a constant choice: Every experience, belief, feeling and thought we have can be shared publicly or not. In a single day, we can take in more information and ideas than was ever possible, yet at the end of the day we can still lack wisdom.

Constant connectivity empties us out, as individuals and as a society, making us shallower thinkers and more impatient with others. When it comes to faith, it can yield a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things, fostering an avoidance of those internal parts of life that are most difficult, things like prayer, uncertainty, humility and the nakedness of who we most truly are amid this confusing, heartbreaking and incandescently beautiful world.

There is … a tendency in our moment to prioritize the distant over the proximate and the big over the small. We can seek to have all the right political opinions and still not really love our actual neighbors, those right around us, in our homes, in our workplaces or on our blocks.

The former senator Ben Sasse wrote, “When we prioritize ‘news’ from afar, we’re saying that our distant-but-shallow communities are more important than our small-but-deep flesh-and-blood ones.” In our time of digitization and rapid information, our temptation is what the philosopher Charles Taylor called “excarnation” — the opposite of “incarnation,” it makes our life into an abstraction.

We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.” True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friends with true faults, of congregations with faces, of the local, the small. Don’t get me wrong: Global and national news is important and I will continue to read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places we meet God — the places we become human — are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion in society, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in a vulnerable conversation or in making breakfast at the homeless shelter down the street, in celebration with a neighbor or in the drowsy prayers uttered while rocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.

The way to battle abstraction in our time is to embrace the material, the incarnation of our lives, the fleshy, complicated, touchable realities right around us in our neighborhoods, churches, friends and families. And this enfleshed, incarnational part of my life and work deserves some extra attention now, at least for a little while.

So, finally, if you’d indulge me a little more, in Anglican liturgy, we wind up our worship service each week with a departure ritual: a closing benediction. So, I want to say to my readers, to those who’ve written and told me about your lives, to those who’ve enthusiastically encouraged me or shared my work with others, to those who’ve disagreed with me respectfully, to those who have disagreed with me less respectfully, to those who are struggling and those who are rejoicing, to those who are afraid or those who are encouraged, to those full of faith and those full of doubt and those full of both at the same time: God bless and keep you. You have been a gift to me and I am grateful for each of you.