2015 In Review

January 4, 2016 at 5:15 am Leave a comment

Happy New Year 2016 images download

This past week, I took some time to scroll through my blogs for 2015. It was, in some ways, an unsettling exercise. Consider these headlines:

January: Transgender teen Leelah Alcorn takes her own life December 28, 2014. By January 2015, rallies are being held in her memory and in support of the transgender movement.
February: The erotic movie “Fifty Shades of Grey” hits theatres, earning $570 million worldwide.
March: The University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter is shutdown after some of its members are caught on camera chanting offensive racial slurs.
April: Rolling Stone retracts its cover article, detailing a gruesome gang rape of a woman at the University of Virginia, after it is discovered that the details of its story cannot be verified and may, in fact, be falsified.
May: Pew Research publishes a poll chronicling the precipitous decline of people claiming to be religiously affiliated.
June: Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner comes out as transgender woman Caitlyn Jenner, nine worshipers are shot and killed by a racist gunman in Charleston, and the Supreme Court legalizes same-sex marriage in all 50 states.
July: The Center for Medical Progress begins releasing undercover videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials offering to sell aborted fetal parts for profit.
August: The website for Ashley Madison, which advertises itself as a service to help people have affairs, is hacked and the data of 37 million of its members is compromised.
September: Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis refuses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and Pope Francis visits the United States.
October: Fallout continues from the Planned Parenthood undercover videos.
November: Students stage demonstrations on college campuses across America protesting what they perceive to be systemic campus racism and Paris is struck by a series of six coordinated terror attacks.
December: A couple opens fire at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California killing 14 in an apparent act of terrorism.

Blogging can be a frustrating discipline because, at times, as my list above intimates, it can become flat-out depressing. It seems as though I’ve blogged on a never-ending succession of tragedies, controversies, and indignities this past year. And yet, as tough as these topics might be to tackle, I believe they are vital for us as Christians to understand and address.

A few themes have emerged as I’ve watched the headlines unfold in 2015. First, it seems as though we are obsessed with sex and oppressed by violence. Between “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the Ashley Madison scandal, and same-sex marriage, headlines relating to human sexuality and the sexual ethics have dominated. But so have headlines relating to violence. The acronym ISIS is now the stuff of household lore. Planned Parenthood’s gruesome harvesting of fetal parts sent shivers up the spines of many. Beatings and shootings with racist tinges dominate the headlines. As a child, I remember my parents criticizing many movies for having too much “sex and violence.” Was art imitating life back then or is life imitating art now?

A second theme that has emerged is a search for who we are as humans. I would be intellectually, emotionally, and relationally naïve if I did not recognize that same-sex marriage is about much more than sex. It is about the ability of people to define themselves as they see themselves. This is also the case with the transgender recrudescence. How internal desires correspond to a person’s biological ordering is key to understanding the existential angst that many people in the LGBT community experience.

Third, issues of race and religion have taken center stage this past year. From the racist chant by members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon to the shooting at the church in Charleston, racism is frustratingly alive and well. At the same time the LGBT community is trying to figure out who it is and arriving at some spiritually dangerous answers, we seem to have forgotten some of the older spiritually salutary lessons we had to learn about who we are as a nation of immigrants. And I would contend that this is true across the racial spectrum. Trumped up charges of racism in the form of the newly minted category of “microaggression” do not help, but neither do denials that racism is real and consequential. Religiously, we are learning quickly – both from Paris and San Bernardino – that bad theologies have terrible consequences. The theological drivers of groups like ISIS cannot be minimalized or rationalized. They must be confronted.

As I reflect on the stories I have covered, I have become convinced more than ever that our world is not just in need of good thinking, but theological thinking on the things that ail us. The problems we have encountered in 2015 are not just the results of some bad thinking that needs to be tuned up by an enlightened intelligentsia so we can march boldly into a utopian era. Rather, the problems we have encountered in 2015 are the results of nothing short of a deeply depraved sinfulness that needs to be confronted by the Word of God. And this is where we, as Christians, have something unique to offer our world. While the world is trying to solve its problems by political, intellectual, and social gerrymandering, we can be confronting and forgiving the sinners – even when those sinners are us – who create the problems. In my mind, that’s our greatest hope for a better world.

Human sin, sadly, will probably continue to give me plenty of reasons to write in 2016. But grace, thankfully, will give me even more reasons to rejoice. So let’s see where the year takes us.