The Great Indoors

Anthony Sacramone resists the call to embrace the great outdoors and simple, country living:

Christians are again becoming suckers for this type of plea. All right, it’s not the apogee of spirituality to log on and buy the latest iteration of an iPod or an iMac or an eyesore of a Hummer. And yes, it’s probably wise to limit your daily consumption of pesticides to roughly half your bodyweight. I’ll grant you that kids are probably spending ’way too much time wide-eyed in front of the flat panel ogling yet another edition of Grand Theft Auto or the director’s cut of Girls Gone Wild 13—Logical Positivists Stripped Bare. It also couldn’t hurt to be able to distinguish between one type of tree and another type of tree, if just to make a more detailed report for the police when you drive into one while talking on your cell.

But surely the Scriptures teach that the New Jerusalem will be a city—not a town, a village, or a set of mud huts. And, meanwhile, the City of Man is not Hicksville. It’s the Big Apple, where a “piebald Parliament, an Anarchasis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man” (to quote Melville) congregates, to buy and sell, to breed and forego breeding, to invent a new mouse trap and spit in the street. The city is where natural law, lawlessness, and the Sword of the Spirit do battle on their Broadways; where multiple cultures jostle for breathing room in the same cathedrals; and where cultural barbarities do us all the favor of advertising the Fall without our having to read about all those “begats” once again.

This may not enter the pantheon of new urbanist thought, but it is quite funny.  Read the rest here.

Rob

UPDATE: For a different (but not necessarily conflicting) view, you may want to check out this interview with neo-agrarian David Goetz and a review of his new book, Death By Suburb:

Because suburban life so privileges the self—its instant gratification, its desire for greener pastures always over the next fence, its search for ease and comfort—the Christian life aimed at crucifying the old man of sin is handicapped, perhaps fatally. Goetz recognizes that the principle of self-love at work in suburbia manipulates Christian desires and offers the illusion of spirituality and religion as just one more product to be acquired.