Friday in the Wild: February 9, 2024

It's Friday, and that means it's time for the weekly roundup of good stuff from around the blogosphere. I've got three articles this week.

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Matt at The 96th Thesis wrote an interesting critique of a presentation about singleness in the church. We might expect the usual handwringing about how churches neglect singles in their ministry programs, and there's some of that. But he asks:

But is the alleged focus given to marriage an inappropriate one in society or even the church?

If so, Christians have a real problem on our hands because the Bible itself treats singleness as "other." Marriage is very much treated as the norm in Holy Scriptures.… God told us to "be fruitful and multiply" before literally anything else. He also made sure to explicitly reiterate it after every global disaster like the Fall or the Flood.

[Read Singleness in the Church]

I'm in my 50s,.and have never been married. I've had some experience with singles ministries in church, and found them to general pie somewhere on the spectrum between a meat market and a therapeutic support group. Not my thing in either case. I agree that marriage with children is the biblical norm. I desire that for myself as well, but my marital status isn't a disorder in need of therapy. Perhaps there's not enough emphasis given to what Paul.says about godly contentment in our present circumstances (Philippians 4:10–13; cf. 1 Corinthians 7:6–11).

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Jonathan Van Maren wrote an op-ed for The European Conservative about the progressive attempts.to hijack a Canadian literary icon, Anne of Green Gables:

Reinterpretation of classic literature is a booming industry. As Tristin Hopper noted in the National Post, in "recent years, even the P.E.I.-based L.M. Montgomery Institute has issued statements accusing their namesake of being a purveyor of colonialist white supremacy," and in 2022, they hosted "a conference of scholars who 'have experience discussing Montgomery's work in connection to conversations on queer theory and gender, colonialism, and diversity in literature.'" Indeed, one academic called Montgomery gay; another LGBT activist writes that she was "homophobic." It never seems to occur to LGBT activists that sometimes their proclivities are simply not relevant to the conversation.

[Read The Kidnapping of Anne of Green Gables]

Or, that if one is saying Montgomery was gay and another that she was homophobic, maybe they should get their story straight, lest us undergraduates conclude that they're making it up as they go.

Along the same lines, Van Maren also wrote in 2022 about "The Queering of J. R. R. Tolkien." To this I could add the renaming of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to the Children's Literature Legacy Award by the American Library Association in 2018, because of Ingalls Wilder's supposed racial insensitivity concerning native Americans. We can no longer appreciate older literature as a product of its own time. It must be re-imagined and rewritten in light of the Current Thing, or else memory-holed. If adults who work in libraries or teach literature can't help us appreciate Montgomery's or Tolkien's work without gaying it up, they're shortchanging us.

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Finally, it's been a year since the Asbury Revival broke out after a chapel service at Asbury University in Kentucky. Samuel Sey asks what happened in the aftermath:

Nearly all of the people I spoke to said individuals from their churches visited Asbury Chapel during the revival, but they said they couldn’t highlight any lasting outcomes. One representative of a Slavic church said the Russia-Ukraine war has had a more noticeable impact on its members than the "revival."

Last February, Zack Meerkrabs, the pastor whose sermon apparently started the revival said no one would know if it was a real revival until months later. A year later, it looks like what happened at Asbury was a fad, not a revival.

[Read What Happened to the Asbury Revival?]

A year ago, if I was ever asked about the Asbury Revival, I said to wait and see. And we did. If we look back at the Great Awakening or the Welsh Revival of 1904, we see them as as watershed events having profound aftereffects even in the present. On the other hand, we don't talk much at all about Brownsville or Lakeland anymore. It looks like, in hindsight, Asbury belongs to the latter group, not the former.

And that's it. Until next time, Share and Enjoy.