Historical Is Not Enough

From First Things
By Carl R. Trueman

Last week, Rod Dreher published a clarion call for Christians not to forget the past. I have deep sympathy with such.  Indeed, I typically start my history lectures each year with the same Kundera quotation which he uses.   Dreher is spot on in his analysis because the repudiation of the past is an essential part of the contemporary cultural project. Phillip Rieff predicted this some years ago, stating that the heart of the coming (and now present) barbarism would be its conscious eradication of the past. The autonomy of psychological man with his repudiation of all external authority made such inevitable. Mario Vargas Llosa sees the culture of the spectacle as doing much the same thing. As entertainment has risen to the status of a human right and moral imperative, both past and future have lost any significance in comparison to the pleasures of the present moment. As Llosa puts it:

World Christianity by the Numbers

From Denver Catholic

By George Weigel

The annual “Status of Global Christianity” survey published by the International Bulletin of Missionary Research is a cornucopia of numbers: some are encouraging; others are discouraging; many of them are important for grasping the nature of this particular moment in Christian history.

This year’s survey works from a baseline of 1900 A.D., and makes projections out to 2050. Within that century and a half there’s some good news about the global human condition that ought to be kept in mind when remembering the bad news of the 20th century and the early 21st. For example: in 1900, 27.6 percent of adults in a world population of 1.6 billion were literate. In 2015, 81 percent of the adults in a global population of 7.3 billion are literate, and the projection is that, by 2050, 88 percent of the adults in a world of 9.5 billion people will be literate—a remarkable accomplishment.