The transformation of David Brooks
There are many explicitly Christian descriptions of sin: fallenness, brokenness, depravity. Keller suggested Brooks try a more neutral phrasing: “disordered love.” When we blab a secret at a party, for example, we misplace love of popularity over love of friendship.
.. Brooks thinks a tradition of journalists fluent, or at least conversant, in moral concepts dissipated in recent decades. Theologians were walled off within their denominations, and public discourse about values grew dysfunctional. A life of “meaning” by today’s standard, he wrote in his Times column to begin 2015, “is flabby and vacuous, the product of a culture that has grown inarticulate about inner life.”
.. “I think there is some allergy our culture has toward moral judgment of any kind,” he reflects. “There is a big relativistic strain through our society that if it feels good for you, then who am I to judge? I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I’d rather take the hits for being a moralizer than to have a public square where there’s no moral thought going on.”
.. She remembers a unifying creed on campus: “The more you know about the past, the better equipped you were to defend civilized life from barbaric perversion.
.. the 18th-century Irish philosopher, spoke of dispositional conservatism, which Brooks defines this way: “It’s a reverence for the past, a belief in incremental change, a distrust of abstract, permanent truths, at least about political matters.”
.. A 2003 column endorsing gay marriage has one of the most jarring ledes he’s ever written: “Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide.” He concluded, “The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments.”