Even today, the famous Serenity Prayer recited at Alcoholic Anonymous meetings is an incarnation of a Stoic principle enunciated by Epictetus: “What, then, is to be done? To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens.” (“Discourses”)
.. Stoic meditation consists in rehearsing the challenges of the day ahead, thinking about which of the four cardinal virtues (courage, equanimity, self-control and wisdom) one may be called on to employ and how.
.. I then pass to the “premeditatio malorum,” a type of visualization in which one imagines some sort of catastrophe happening to oneself (such as losing one’s job), and learns to see it as a “dispreferred indifferent,” meaning that it would be better if it didn’t happen, but that it would nonetheless not affect one’s worth and moral value. .. it is very similar to an analogous practice in C.B.T. meant to ally one’s fears of particular objects or events.
.. Take, for instance, the Stoic concept of Logos, the rational principle that governs the universe.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Mennonite Heritage
Yeah. I grew up in southwestern Ontario in the heart of a Mennonite community. All my family are part of the Mennonite church. I joked at [the recent evangelical conference] Catalyst that I’m the only member of my family who had never delivered a sermon. Everyone has been to seminary, been a lay preacher, the list is very, very long in my extended family of people who have had opportunities to give a sermon.
Clint Eastwood’s Sniper, and the American Messiah
The father, sitting at the head of the table, says, to this effect: there are three kinds of people in this world: sheep, who can’t take care of themselves; wolves, who prey upon the sheep; and sheep-dogs, who look after the sheep and keep the wolves at bay. I ain’t raising no sheep, he says, and then pulling off his belt and laying it on the table, says further, and if either of you becomes a wolf I’ll kick your ass. Instead, he makes the moral lesson clear to his sons: I’m raising sheep-dogs.
This is where the moral narrative becomes all important to the shape of the virtues: it is classic Hollywood, suffused with a bit of holiness as the hero carries about a New Testament with him, and the world is neatly divided between good and evil. It’s a re-skinning of George Bush’s axis of evil; of cowboys and Indians ..
.. It’s as unrealistic as the foolishness that got the United States into the war in Iraq in the first place: the George W. Bush rhetoric that insisted that it is possible to “defeat evil” and to win a “war on terror.”
This is Messianic language employed in service to militaristic politics, and it is idolatrous as it was employed by Bush, and though more subtle in American Sniper, still as dangerous.
.. Then there is the laughable employment of the New Testament, which Eastwood’s Kyle carries about with him on his killing missions. (It says a great deal, however, that Eastwood’s Kyle merely carries it, but never reads it.) The militaristic, nationalistic tyranny over Christianity in America remains shocking to me. I cannot understand why people who say they read the Sermon on the Mount, or Romans 12, or 1 Peter, continue to let the Eastwoods of this world get away with such subversion of the Christian tradition. Little would most non-Christian Americans have any idea that the New Testament is, in fact, a text subversive to imperialist agendas.
Creation: Reconnect to original identity “hidden with Christ in God”
The Bible calls the state of separateness “sin,” and the essential task of all religion is to reconnect people to their original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).