“The Next Normal” – First truly global portrait of the millennial generation, exploring 9-30 year olds across 24 countries.

In exploring Millennial attitudes toward religion, faith and spirituality across the globe, we found that overall, this generation believes that everybody should have the right to choose their own religion. But their openness and tolerance are also marked by distrust in organised religion, as well as distinctions between faith and spirituality in some countries.

On average, only 9% of Millennials say they trust their religious leader and only 10% name “religious leader” among the top 5 inspirational people or bodies of people in their lives (compared to 19% for celebrities and 14% for sports stars). In terms of trust in religious leaders (who could be anyone from a local priest, preacher, imam or rabbi to the Pope), South Africa comes out strongest with a score of 29% trust – still a relatively small minority – followed by USA on 24% and Turkey on 17%.  Trust in religious leaders is lowest in France (2%), Japan and Spain (both 3%).

Overall, we see religion still having some hold among Millennials in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil and India – but in contrast, Millennials in China, Russia, Japan and many of the Western European countries – including traditionally Catholic countries such as France, Spain and Italy – demonstrate ever more secular attitudes.

In the world of Millennials, spirituality and faith are, for the most part, closely aligned.  While there are a handful of countries – for example, Egypt and South Africa – where religion carries greater weight among the concerns of young people, in most countries our data demonstrates similar patterns of engagement with spirituality vs caring about faith/religion (31% and 33% respectively).  Indeed, there is significantly higher emphasis on spirituality than faith/religion in Japan, Russia and China.

In this era of openness, tolerance and flexibility – key traits of the Millennial mindset – young people are characteristically positive about the right of people to practice whatever faith or religion they choose:  on average, almost 9 in 10 – and the only countries where the level dips below 4 in 5 are Saudi Arabia and Japan.

However, although strongly in favour of religious tolerance, other indications show that, with the exception of a small sub-set of countries, the Millennial generation is somewhat less actively involved in practicing religion.

Moreover, unlike the relatively uniform pattern we see in terms of people’s rights to practice religion, the extent of support for people’s responsibility to practice religion varies considerably between countries.

On average, only 14% of Millennials globally place “having faith/religion” among their top 5 sources of happiness – ranked #15 from a list of 20 potential happiness drivers.  The level increases to above 20% in only 7 of the countries surveyed (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Mexico, USA, Brazil and Turkey), with the score dropping significantly in several countries (Sweden, Germany, Spain, China and Russia, for example).

On average, 20% globally turn to prayer as a way to relax when feeling stressed.  The countries where this is more likely to be the case correlate strongly with those where faith/religion is a source of happiness (and conversely we find lower scores in countries where faith/religion has little bearing on happiness).

While for the most part young people around the world share increasingly similar values and attitudes to the world around them, the matter of faith and religion is one which continues to provide a point of difference today.  However, given the almost globally low trust we have seen placed in organised religion and the people who represent it, we could be looking at a future in which a more personal form of spirituality may come to hold ever greater importance in the lives of young people around the world.

Breakdowns for specific results are available on request at blog@viacom.com.

Christian Kurz is Vice President of Research & Insights for Viacom International Media Networks. Follow Christian at @kurzch.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

The Canticle of the Creatures

St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226)

Most High, all-powerful, good Lord,

all praise is yours, all glory, all honor,
and all blessing.

To you, alone, Most High, do they belong.

No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.

All praise be yours, my Lord,

through all you have made,

and first my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day;

and through whom you give us light.

How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor;

Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

All Praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Moon

and the stars; in the heavens you have made them,

bright, and precious, and fair.

All praise be yours, my Lord,

through Brothers wind and air, and fair and stormy,

all the weather’s moods,

by which you cherish all that you have made.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Water,

so useful, humble, precious and pure.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire,

through whom you brighten up the night.

How beautiful is he, how cheerful!

Full of power and strength.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through our Sister

Mother Earth, who sustains us and governs us,

and produces various fruits with colored flowers

and herbs.

All praise be yours, my Lord,

through those who grant pardon for love of you;

through those who endure sickness and trial.

Happy are those who endure in peace,

By You, Most High, they will be crowned.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,

From whose embrace no mortal can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin!

Happy those she finds doing your will!

The second death can do them no harm.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks

And serve him with great humility.

                THE CHRISTIAN IMPERATIVE FOR GREENING AND

SUSTAINABILITY

William C. Green

UCC Architects’ Fellowship – Minneapolis, Minnesota

October 17-19, 2008

Synopsis: God’s grace comes through physical means.  This includes the environment—and architecture.  These shape our closeness to God, nature, one another, and the church.

      What is true in everyday life is also true of our response, or lack thereof, to the environment.  How much we miss what is right before our eyes!  Used to seeing what we have seen before, our relationships become routine and inertial, whether with others and the church—or the environment.  It often takes a crisis before we realize how much we have disregarded.  And crisis we’re surely facing with the environment.  I will not now detail again the myriad problems before us that literally threaten life on the planet.  This still doesn’t seem sufficiently immediate to make many of us alarmed.  (The best and most recent aid in this regard is surely Thomas Friedman’s latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America, 2008).

Just as improvement in our behavior in other respects isn’t motivated most reliably by threats and feelings of guilt, so with a stronger and more positive response to the environment.  A good ecological conscience, and smarter and more reliable action, arise best not from the badness of things, including our own behavior, but from the goodness of what we value and want to protect and make better.  This is like wanting to give up smoking not just because it’s bad for me and, really, for the environment as well, but because I want to respect and preserve my good health, not to say the air others breathe.

For positive change to happen our mindset must change—including our theology and view of creation.  Seeing, honoring, and acting on “goodness” can be hard when we’re all pretty self-absorbed and often inured anyway to how bad things are and how things go bad.  It’s not surprising that our economy is no better than our ecology!

Moses wasn’t that different from us.  His story points to how important it is to look again at what we face, regardless of circumstance, before we can see how much goodness we might otherwise miss that could change our lives.  He brings to mind something Marcel Proust wrote: “The only true voyage of discovery [the only way to learn new things—WG] is not to go to new places and do new things, but to have other eyes.”  (In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 5, “The Captive,” chapter 2, 1923.)  To have other eyes—right where we are, “Just as I am, without one plea,” as the old gospel song has it.

Moses looked again, had “other eyes,” and his life took a whole new turn.  He was simply doing his job, herding his sheep, when there in the desert he saw a common shrub that, on second glance, seemed unusual.  Jewish legend has it that others had passed this way before but, eager to get to their destination, they had no time to look around.

But in the midst of his own work, Moses stopped, turned aside, looked again, and even listened.  That desert bush seemed to be on fire!  And going closer he found the flame of his own passion as he encountered the divine, learned the very name of God, and became the foremost leader of God’s people.

Writes the poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes

– The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

(Aurora Leigh 7)

       An ecological conscience is ignited by the blaze of “common bushes.”  Looking at what we face with other eyes can inspire reverence and awe which, as with Moses, are preconditions of faith and belief.  If our closeness to God is set outside our closeness with creation, Christian experience loses its sense of God and the world.  Reverence and awe are weakened and Christianity compromises both its christology and soteriology.  That is, it distorts—denatures, if you will—both its view of Christ and salvation.

We need to hold together both God’s invitation to us and God’s enfleshment, as well as our own, within creation—the Word became flesh, after all: flesh of our flesh, flesh of the world, representative of creation; and, for all our flaws, we’re created in the image of God to which all is to be restored under the Lordship of Christ.

A theological problem has bedeviled the relationship between theology and what we now call ecology.  It’s a consequence of the old problem of natural theology and the relationship between nature and grace.  It’s what heretofore has been the divisive difference between what Catholic theologian David Tracy calls the Catholic imagination, which is “analogical” or sacramental, and the Protestant “dialectical” imagination.  This is largely a heuristic distinction—that is, something that provokes and guides investigation—not a distinction that plays out so neatly in actual fact.

The Catholic religious imagination has tended to emphasize the similarity between God and objects, events, experiences, persons, and creation itself.  This imagination is called “sacramental” because that designates an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.  The recurrently dominant Protestant religious imaginations have tended to emphasize the difference between God and objects, events, experiences, persons, and creation itself.  Protestant concern has focused on keeping uncompromised the transcendence of God, avoiding any threat of idolatry, pantheism, or “immanentism” in which something less than God shapes spiritual practice or becomes the actual object of worship, intended or not.  (See David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 1981.)

So, in sum, the tendency of the Catholic imagination has been to say “similar” when the prevailing Protestant imagination has said “different”—or at least “Watch out!”  The Protestant imagination has historically stressed opposition—or strong tension—between God and World: God is the totally Other, basically different from creation.  The Catholic imagination has responded by saying that God is similar to the world and is self-revealed in the world, especially through Jesus who, as the Word become flesh, is representative of us and all of creation.

The issue here is not doctrine, for both Catholic and Protestant believe that Jesus is human and divine.  The issue is rather, on the one hand, identifying the sacramentality of Jesus too much with the natural world, or, on the other hand, isolating the Word of Jesus too much from the natural world.  In terms perhaps too stark, it’s a matter of accommodation versus tension.

In terms of architectural aesthetics the issue here might be cast as, on the one hand, designing a church building too much in terms of its immediate environment, or, on the other hand, distinguishing the church building too much from its environment.  Without presuming on either side disregard for sustainability or insensitivity to worship space and liturgy, this might be understood as the difference between Richard Giles in Re-Pitching the Tent (3^rd edition, 2004) and Michael Rose in Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces—and How We Can Change Them Back Again (2001).

In a well balanced Christianity the dialogue between analogy and God’s expression in the world, and then dialectic and the opposition or tension between God and the world—this dialogue is useful and creative.  There’s obviously something important to honor on both sides, and neither “side” has, in practice, performed better than the other.  And back to Giles and Rose: neither is inarguably “right” in their respective orientations and in  both one can find, or could, expressions of both analogy and dialectic.  In the tension between analogy and dialectic, complementarity and cooperation can lead to more constructive and transformative action, and, no doubt, good architecture as well.

One of the harmful effects of the Reformation is that the dialogue broke down for 400 years.  Contributing to this were the consequences of a persisting Platonic spiritual/material, mind-body dualism inherited from strong strains of early Christian thought.  This mindset came to be reinforced by the thought of Descarte, Enlightenment rationality, and the rise of science and capitalism.  These forces influenced religious thought and, however helpful in their own right, tended to emphasize mind over matter, quantify everything, and eventually reduce all things spiritual and material to commodities or de-mystified and potentially manipulable realities.

Thanks to the advent of environmental theology, whatever the latest idioms, the theological dialogue between analogical and dialectical dispositions is promising.  This is helpfully influenced by the stronger ecumenical spirit of our times, and the need to pursue practical strategies for action.

For Christians, this dialogue is sometimes advanced by adverting to the church’s own history, which is not simply one of domination, individualistic salvation, or scenarios from the book of Revelation in which seeking to preserve the earth and its resources is a denial of the great cataclysm that awaits us.

I will cite one example from church history.  Secondly, I will look again at the Bible for another basic approach to creation than what is more often cited from the first chapters of Genesis.  Thirdly, I will share something from mathematical cosmology which can invigorate both an analogical and dialectical imagination, much as does the poetic prayer of St. Francis with which we began.  Then, lastly I will conclude with several observations and questions.

All of this is in the spirit of the story of Moses’ experience with the desert shrub and “looking again,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sense of the earth being “crammed with heaven,” St. Francis’ “The Canticle of the Creatures,” Marcel Proust’s emphasis on having “other eyes,” and the great poem, “God’s Grandeur,” by Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, which was handed out and that you can read at your leisure.  And all I’m attempting seeks one way and another to correlate a sense of God’s transcendence and immanence and can undergird a Christian ecological conscience—one that, to make an effective difference, must, ultimately, be incorporated in aesthetic and spiritual experiences of the church and believers.

Earlier Christian doctrine held that God was the author of two texts: the Book of God, or the Bible, and the Book of Nature.  The two were co-extensive.  A true Christian read the eternal truths of God’s design from Nature back to the Bible, and vice-versa.  In the medieval world the stars in the sky and the leaves on the trees were shot through with divine meaning, signifiers of the Creator’s absolute authorship.

Writing in the 12^th century, a generation before St. Francis, the theologian, Hugh of St. Victor, emphasized to his contemporaries the importance of seeing through the outward appearance of things to recover their divine significance.  He wrote:

“For this whole world is a book written by the finger of God, that is created by divine power…. But just as some illiterate man who sees an open book looks at the figures but does not recognize the letters, just so the foolish man who does not perceive the things of God outwardly in the creation before him nor inwardly understand the reason.  But he who is spiritual considers outwardly the beauty of the work while inwardly conceiving how marvelous is the wisdom of the Creator.”  (cited by Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible, Yale, 1988.)

What a high and elusive ideal for architectural design that honors God’s glory: trying to express outwardly by the beauty of the work something that can inspire inwardly a keen sense of “how marvelous is the wisdom of the Creator” for whom the artist him- or herself works.

Now, let’s see how the Book of Nature and the Book of God, the Bible, correlate in biblical accounts of creation.  Luke Timothy Johnson thinks the problem in starting with the Genesis accounts is that these can weaken understanding of God’s own self-disclosure in creation.  He also thinks the Genesis accounts can foreclose an understanding of creation as ongoing—restored and fulfilled, not displaced, by the “new creation” heralded and embodied by Christ.  (For parts of what follows, see Luke Timothy Johnson, “Caring for the Earth: Why Environmentalism Needs Theology,”

Commonweal 132, 2005.)

Johnson says, “a more adequate theology of creation begins not with Genesis but with the Psalms and with the biblical confession of God as the Living God.  The Psalms speak of God’s creating the world, not in the distant past, but new every day….”  Creation is the world coming-into-being—and being held in being—by the power of God.

Consider this passage from Psalm 104 (v. 24f.)

“O Lord, how manifold are your works!  In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.  Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great.  There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.

“These all look to you to give them their food in due season; when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.  When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.  When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.  May the glory of the Lord endure forever…. I will sing to the Lord as long as I live…. May my meditation be pleasing to him…. Bless the Lord, O my soul.  Praise the Lord!”

From this perspective, “the world is the medium of God’s self-expression.  God as spirit chooses to make that which is not spirit, and through the medium of matter to make Godself known as spirit!  How can we then not see the created universe as God’s self-expression, the body that God uses to accomplish God’s purposes?…. The earth itself is able to reveal God.”  There is no intimacy with God apart from intimacy with creation—and all that honors creation.

Now, going back to the Genesis accounts and noting again that the second creation account stands in creative tension with the first, perhaps we can be more carefully attuned to the text.  Humans are not simply created in the image of God and placed over other creatures.  They are drawn from the same stuff as other creatures.  Their sovereignty, if such it is, is humility—humility in the image of the God who went out of supreme self-sufficiency and took upon Godself the limitation of creating the world, out of sheer love.

“In Genesis, a reflection of that humility is the labor of gardening, which is never possible unless one understands how the earth gives life, unless one not only tills but also preserves.”

The rebellion of Adam and Eve, what’s called the Fall, comes from wanting another kind of sovereignty than anything involving humility.  It comes from wanting more than what God provides, and eating what has been forbidden.  In going beyond their limits, humankind’s mythic and all-too-representative forbears, assume a place like God’s over all creation, disregarding God’s own humility in creating them in the first place.

The enmity which exists between humans and the rest of creation is a consequence of this rebellion—a consequence of pride, the absence of reverence and awe, and, shooting through all of this, an inability to accept limits that acknowledge we’re part of something much bigger and more important than ourselves without which we wouldn’t exist.

Now…let me come at all this from an entirely different direction.  Or so it must surely seem at first.

I want to present a long quotation from a cosomologist, Brian Swimme.  Swimme teaches in Oregon and California.  The first of his engaging books, from which this quote comes, is The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story (Orbis Books, 1999).

“From a physical point of view…different ion flows would give you qualitatively different experiences; or, equally true, a qualitatively different mood would manifest as a different movement of ions in your nervous system.  The question I want to ask is simply this.  What enables the ions to move?  Or what enables you to think?  On what power do you rely for your thinking, feeling, and wondering?

“Ions do not move by their own power…. A close examination shows that an energy-soaked molecule in the brain is responsible for the ion movement.  Closer examination shows that this molecule is able to push ions around because of energy it got, ultimately, from the food that you eat.  The food got the energy from the sun…. Right now, this moment, ions are flowing this way and that because of the manner in which you have organized energy from the sun….

“This leads us to the edge of the primeval fireball, to the moment of creation itself.  The primeval fireball was a vast gushing forth of light, first so powerful that it carried elementary particles about as if they were bits of bark on a tidal wave….

“Hydrogen atoms rage with energy from the fireball, symphonic storms of energy held together in communities extremely reluctant to give this energy up.  But in the cores of stars, hydrogen atoms are forced to release their energy in the form of photons, and this photonic shower from the beginning of time powers your thinking.  So fire from the beginning of time fires us now: we are cosmic fire!

“We are the universe come to consciousness and the psychic energy by which we live is nothing other than the energy of the whole universe.  The story of the universe is our story.  If we do not know the story, we do not know anything….”

The analogical imagination of a cosmologist can read the Book of Nature back to the Book of God—as can happen the other way around.  The story of the universe is our story…but it is also the story of God.  As Swimme puts it, “…attention needs to be paid to the extreme fineness—a matter of milliseconds—of the condition of emergence and survival of the universe.  To grasp the emergent probability of the universe is to experience immanent Providence.”

It’s not hard to see the religious value of the scientific explanation of creation.  We are part of the universe.  The universe is bigger than we are.  Its concerns are more important than ours, while including this planet and us.  The universe itself is the primary sacred community.  We have to change our way of thinking from human-centered to universe-centered.  In so doing our own createdness, our own creatureliness, can be seen more provocatively as intertwined, interdependent, with all aspects of the universe, and with creation as we know it.

So St. Francis in “The Canticle of the Creatures” speaks of Brother Sun, and Sister Moon, Brothers wind and air, “and fair and stormy, all the weather’s moods”; also Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Mother Earth, and, then, Sister Death, “From whose embrace no mortal can escape… Happy those she finds doing [God’s] will!  The second death can do them no harm.”

In the same spirit, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.  It will flame out [the cosmologist would like that: “flame out”], like shining from shook foil; it gathers to a greatness.”  Then later in the poem—and the hope of God’s “new creation”—Hopkins writes, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went, Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs—Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.”

Now is all this just analogical?  Isn’t it also “dialectical”?  Is all this pantheism, or just a form of immanentism and a denial of God’s transcendence?  How risky is it, really, that the Book of Nature will prove a  diversion from, or diminution of, the Book of God?

For Hugh of St. Victor who speaks of the outward beauty of God’s work and “how marvelous is the wisdom of the Creator,” does he mean that this outward beauty showing the wisdom of the Creator is the same as the Creator?

And so with the Psalmist who speaks (or was it sings?) of God the Creator and Provider, declaring, “O Lord, how manifold are your works!  In wisdom you have made them all.”  Is the Psalmist at all diminishing God’s transcendence?  Furthermore, like Hugh who speaks of “illiterates” the Psalmist speaks of sinners and wickedness when the Lord isn’t praised and God isn’t glorified, so judgment follows accordingly from this indisputably higher power.

In this same spirit, Hopkins says that we have really messed up nature. It’s thanks neither to nature, despite its “dearest freshness deep down things,” nor thanks to us that all is not lost.  It’s thanks to God’s Spirit—the Holy Ghost—from which life comes in the first place and “who over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.”  From the ongoing love of God’s Spirit comes hope for nature and for us.  This Spirit loves us back to life—redeeming and restoring what in creation is already there.

For the cosmologist, as with St. Francis: Is either saying that God or Providence is simply immanent and not transcendent?  Rather it’s providential how things cosmic and planetary are bonded together, much like a good relationship between father and son, or mother and daughter, or brother and sister, or partner and partner, friend and friend.

Such are the kinds of webs and interconnections that make the universe possible, including the earth and its environment, and humankind, including us.  All of this is an expression of cosmic fire, says the cosmologist, just as we are expressions of God, created in the divine image, marring that image by pretensions of our own sovereignty—being revested in that image in the course of responding to God’s Spirit in Christ.

And with St. Francis, remember that he says “All praise be yours, my Lord, through all you have made”—not in all you have made.  Something can be expressed through something else and still be transcendent over it and in tension with it—much as an artist expresses his or her art without being the same as it.

In literature, when Romeo calls Juliet the sun because she brings light and warmth to his life, he knows (although apparently Juliet was pretty hot!), that Juliet isn’t actually the sun.  Anyway, she’s on the balcony not in the sky, and her temperature is around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit which is substantially lower than the sun’s.

If, with Romeo, you assert the similarity between Juliet and the sun, there is still time to say, “but of course, Juliet is different from the sun.”  However, if you begin by saying that Juliet is radically different from the sun, you certainly have an unobjectionable statement but hardly one that evokes appreciation for the romantic power and influence of Juliet, you don’t have very engaging poetry, and you certainly don’t have a functioning metaphor.

The same with Elizabeth Barret Browning.  When she says “earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God,” she is not saying earth is heaven and every bush is God.  Rather, like Moses, and along with Hugh of St. Victor, she sees through these things the reality of heaven and God.

Both “difference” and “connectedness” are basically intertwined.  Each brings to light the other.  And so it is that art illumines life, life or creation illumines God, and Christ illumines creation, life, and God as so much art including literature show, visually or verbally.  And now more and more scientists are seeing their own work with an artistic sensibility evoked by the complexity and mystery of the universe, the planet—and the human psyche.

Now I’d like to wrap up with several matters for further reflection or discussion.  You may wish to raise others.

But, first, from me:

I’ve said we can’t conceive of intimacy with God apart from intimacy with creation—and all that honors creation.  You know a lot more than do I about the process of producing green architecture and sustainable design.

The importance of site analysis and planning, energy conservation, the effect of building materials, concern for the quality of the indoor environment, the importance of recycling and waste management, and then building operation that can realize the full value of sustainable design …these are critical considerations.  They lend emphasis to a question: What’s the problem in saying the building is important, yes, but far less so than the church whose real purpose is to do mission—neither the building nor mission existing for the sake of the church?

What’s wrong with the famous Avery and Marsh song, sung so frequently in Sunday School: “The church is not a building, the church is not a steeple, the church is not a resting place, the church is a people”?

What might it mean to think of the church building “sacramentally”—an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace?  What might it mean to think of the church not only in terms of mission “out there” but as mission in the first place where we worship God and are formed, or re-formed, in community under the influence of Christ?

Secondly, this:

In all I’ve cited this morning—from the Bible and theology, from poetry and cosmology—and whatever of this you prefer, there is a common denominator.  The UCC’s own National Book Award winner and active church member, the author of Gilead, and now Home, Marilynne Robinson puts it this way:  “It’s only very recently that you couldn’t see how the high arts are intimately connected to religion, contemporary fiction, science, Idaho and far more….  Reverence, a kind of humility, corrects (tendencies) to warp or harden.”  (Paris Review, Fall 2008; Harvard Divinity Bulletin, “Credo: Reverence First and then Belief,” Spring, 2008).  So how can church architecture inspire reverence and awe?

Surely the issue here runs deeper than what’s addressed by Richard Giles in Re-Pitching the Tent: Too often, he writes, “Christians are to be found worshipping in long Gothic tunnels…cowering beneath balconies and lurking behind pillars….”  We wouldn’t want another church like St. John the Divine in New York, perhaps, although as we say that we should study its own creative greening and its strong commitment to sustainability.

Is the only choice between some equivalent of “long Gothic tunnels” and an allegedly more “welcoming” church that needn’t look like a church, and could resemble an elementary school or a library?  Is that the real issue?

Lastly, it seems to me that the pressure on a church architect can be unbearable.  On the one hand he or she has her or his own aesthetic taste and conviction, on the other hand the boss is the building committee.

I’ve talked in different ways about God’s self-expression in creation as honored or not in our relationship with God through the environment.  How is that sensibility and conviction at work on a building committee, the group that calls the shots?  One rarely senses a belief that religion is really so important that it’s worthy of a great house, however small and modest the congregation and its financial resources.  Besides, the church is supposed to care more about others than itself.

The committee is frequently selected from those with some concern for sustainability, some practical knowledge of building, and a sense of obligation regardless of prior knowledge or experience.  Their understanding and objectives often stop with the physical matters of “bricks and mortar,” plumbing, and adequate parking.  Expediency rules; virtuosity is feared; and mediocrity is comfortable and good enough.  Not always true but true enough.

An architect is not a theologian or pastor.  But without careful discussion long before design begins, the question of what the church is about and how our intimacy with God is tied into the building and the environment gets begged, to the later detriment of the building actually designed and the faith and belief of church members.  A good church building at once reflects and challenges the interests and beliefs of the people.

Again, the church is already mission in the sense that it is called to embody and express within its own walls what mission “out there” is all about, outside its walls.  The help of a pastor or another theologically sensitive leader is critical.  I am no architect, but I can’t imagine working with a church without the sensitivity and help of such leadership.  I have a hunch that you don’t need this reminder from me.

In summary fashion, these are the three related questions for reflection or discussion I’ve just shared, although you may have others.

(1)  What’s wrong with Avery and Marsh’s “The church is not a building, the church is not a steeple…the church is a people”?

What does it mean to think of the church building “sacramentally”?

(2)   How can the church building inspire reverence and awe?

(3)   How can the aesthetic and religious sensitivity of a church architect

evoke something comparable on the building committee?

_____________________________________________________________

Now I stop.  I myself am convinced that the Christian imperative for greening and sustainability is more than an imperative.  It’s a provocative invitation and opportunity to experience closeness to God more broadly and deeply than ever before.  And it challenges us to see with new eyes how the church building inspires faith.  I hope I’ve been able to share something of this spirit.  Thank you!

Further reading recommended:

Robin Attfield, “Environmental Sensitivity and Critiques of Stewardship.”  In R.J. Berry, ed., Environmental Stewardship: Critical Perspectives (T. & T. Clark, 2006)

Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural Theology (Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1946)

Dennis Edwards, Ecology at the Heart of Faith (Orbis Books, 2006)

Kristin Feireiss, Lukas Feireiss, Architecture of Change: Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment (Die Gestalten Verlag, 2008; in English)

Richard L. Fern, Nature, God, and Humanity: Envisioning an Ethics of Nature (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2002)

Richard Giles, Re-Pitching the Tent (Canterbury Press, 2004)

T.J. Gorringe, A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2002)

Daniel Hillel, The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures (ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2007)

Richard Kieckhefer, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (OxfordUniversity Press, 2004)

Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian  Theology (OxfordUniversity Press, 2008)

Alison Lurie, “God’s Houses”—review of ten books on church architecture (The New York Review of Books, vol. 50, number 12, July 17, 2003)

Robert Murray, Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation (Sheed and Ward, 1992)

Jesse Reiser, Atlas of Novel Tectonics (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006)

Joseph Sittler, Essays on Nature and Grace (Fortress Press, 1972)

Helaine Selin, editor, Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-Western Cultures (Kluwer, 2003)

David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (Crossroad, 1981)

From T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets: Little Gidding”

“The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-

To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

What’s most momentous about the new biology of loneliness is that it offers concrete proof, obtained through the best empirical means, that the poets and bluesmen and movie directors who for centuries have deplored the ravages of lonesomeness on both body and soul were right all along. As W. H. Auden put it, “We must love one another or die.”

Sometime in the late ’50s, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann sat down to write an essay about a subject that had been mostly overlooked by other psychoanalysts up to that point. Even Freud had only touched on it in passing. She was not sure, she wrote, “what inner forces” made her struggle with the problem of loneliness, though she had a notion. It might have been the young female catatonic patient who began to communicate only when Fromm-Reichmann asked her how lonely she was. “She raised her hand with her thumb lifted, the other four fingers bent toward her palm,” Fromm-Reichmann wrote. The thumb stood alone, “isolated from the four hidden fingers.” Fromm-Reichmann responded gently, “That lonely?” And at that, the woman’s “facial expression loosened up as though in great relief and gratitude, and her fingers opened.”

Fromm-Reichmann would later become world-famous as the dumpy little therapist mistaken for a housekeeper by a new patient, a severely disturbed schizophrenic girl named Joanne Greenberg. Fromm-Reichmann cured Greenberg, who had been deemed incurable. Greenberg left the hospital, went to college, became a writer, and immortalized her beloved analyst as “Dr. Fried” in the best-selling autobiographical novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (later also a movie and a pop song). Among analysts, Fromm-Reichmann, who had come to the United States from Germany to escape Hitler, was known for insisting that no patient was too sick to be healed through trust and intimacy. She figured that loneliness lay at the heart of nearly all mental illness and that the lonely person was just about the most terrifying spectacle in the world. She once chastised her fellow therapists for withdrawing from emotionally unreachable patients rather than risk being contaminated by them. The uncanny specter of loneliness “touches on our own possibility of loneliness,” she said. “We evade it and feel guilty.”

Her 1959 essay, “On Loneliness,” is considered a founding document in a fast-growing area of scientific research you might call loneliness studies. Over the past half-century, academic psychologists have largely abandoned psychoanalysis and made themselves over as biologists. And as they delve deeper into the workings of cells and nerves, they are confirming that loneliness is as monstrous as Fromm-Reichmann said it was. It has now been linked with a wide array of bodily ailments as well as the old mental ones.

In a way, these discoveries are as consequential as the germ theory of disease. Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer—tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people.

The psychological definition of loneliness hasn’t changed much since Fromm-Reichmann laid it out. “Real loneliness,” as she called it, is not what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard characterized as the “shut-upness” and solitariness of the civilized. Nor is “real loneliness” the happy solitude of the productive artist or the passing irritation of being cooped up with the flu while all your friends go off on some adventure. It’s not being dissatisfied with your companion of the moment—your friend or lover or even spouse— unless you chronically find yourself in that situation, in which case you may in fact be a lonely person. Fromm-Reichmann even distinguished “real loneliness” from mourning, since the well-adjusted eventually get over that, and from depression, which may be a symptom of loneliness but is rarely the cause. Loneliness, she said—and this will surprise no one—is the want of intimacy.

Today’s psychologists accept Fromm-Reichmann’s inventory of all the things that loneliness isn’t and add a wrinkle she would surely have approved of. They insist that loneliness must be seen as an interior, subjective experience, not an external, objective condition. Loneliness “is not synonymous with being alone, nor does being with others guarantee protection from feelings of loneliness,” writes John Cacioppo, the leading psychologist on the subject. Cacioppo privileges the emotion over the social fact because—remarkably—he’s sure that it’s the feeling that wreaks havoc on the body and brain. Not everyone agrees with him, of course. Another school of thought insists that loneliness is a failure of social networks. The lonely get sicker than the non-lonely, because they don’t have people to take care of them; they don’t have social support.

To the degree that loneliness has been treated as a matter of public concern in the past, it has generally been seen as a social problem—the product of an excessively conformist culture or of a breakdown in social norms. Nowadays, though, loneliness is a public health crisis. The standard U.S. questionnaire, the UCLA Loneliness Scale, asks 20 questions that run variations on the theme of closeness—“How often do you feel close to people?” and so on. As many as 30 percent of Americans don’t feel close to people at a given time.

Loneliness varies with age and poses a particular threat to the very old, quickening the rate at which their faculties decline and cutting their lives shorter. But even among the not-so-old, loneliness is pervasive. In a survey published by the AARP in 2010, slightly more than one out of three adults 45 and over reported being chronically lonely (meaning they’ve been lonely for a long time). A decade earlier, only one out of five said that. With baby-boomers reaching retirement age at a rate of 10,000 a day, the number of lonely Americans will surely spike.

Obviously, the sicker lonely people get, the more care they’ll need. This is true, and alarming, although as we learn more about loneliness, we’ll also be better able to treat it. But to me, what’s most momentous about the new biology of loneliness is that it offers concrete proof, obtained through the best empirical means, that the poets and bluesmen and movie directors who for centuries have deplored the ravages of lonesomeness on both body and soul were right all along. As W. H. Auden put it, “We must love one another or die.”

Who are the lonely? They’re the outsiders: not just the elderly, but also the poor, the bullied, the different. Surveys confirm that people who feel discriminated against are more likely to feel lonely than those who don’t, even when they don’t fall into the categories above. Women are lonelier than men (though unmarried men are lonelier than unmarried women). African Americans are lonelier than whites (though single African American women are less lonely than Hispanic and white women). The less educated are lonelier than the better educated. The unemployed and the retired are lonelier than the employed.

A key part of feeling lonely is feeling rejected, and that, it turns out, is the most damaging part. Psychologists discovered this by, among other things, studying the experience of gay men during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, when the condition was knocking out their immune systems, and, as it seemed at first, only theirs. The nation ignored the crisis for a while, then panicked. Soon, people all over the country were calling for gay men to be quarantined.

To psychologists trying to puzzle out how social experiences affect health, AIDS amounted to something of a natural experiment, the chance to observe the effects of conditions so extreme that no ethical person would knowingly subject another person to them. The disease came from a virus—HIV—that was neutralizing all the usual defenses of a discrete group of people who could be compared with each other and also with a control group of the uninfected. That allowed researchers in a lab at UCLA to take on one of life’s biggest questions, which had become even more urgent as the disease laid waste to thousands, then tens of thousands: Could social experiences explain why some people die faster than others?

In the mid-to late ’80s, the UCLA lab obtained access to a long-term study of gay men who enrolled without knowing whether they were infected with HIV. About half of them tested positive for the virus, and about a third of those agreed to let researchers put their lives under a microscope, answering extensive questions about drug use, sexual behavior, attitudes toward their own homosexuality, levels of emotional support, and so on. By 1993, around one-third of that group had developed full-blown AIDS, and slightly more than a quarter had died.

Steven Cole was a young postdoctoral student in the lab itching to move beyond his field’s mind-body split. At the time, he told me, psychology was only just beginning to grasp “how the physical world of our bodies gets remodeled by our psychic and conceptual worlds.” When the UCLA researchers started trying to figure out which social factors sped up the progress of the disease, they tested obvious ones like socioeconomic status and levels of support. Curiously, though, being poor or lacking family and friends didn’t much change the rate at which an infected man would die of AIDS (although being in mourning, as gay men often were those days, did seem to weaken an infected man’s immune system).

It eventually occurred to Cole to try to imagine the world from a gay man’s perspective. That wasn’t easy for him: “I’m a straight kid from the suburbs. I had stereotypes, but I didn’t really know the reality of these people’s lives.” Then he read a book, Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity, that tallies in detail the difficulties of “passing” as someone else. He learned that the closeted man must police every piece of information known about him, live in constant terror of exposure or blackmail, and impose sharp limits on intimacy, or at least friendship. “It was like walking around with a time-bomb,” says Cole.

Cole figured that a man who’d hide behind a false identity was probably more sensitive than others to the pain of rejection. His temperament would be more tightly wound, and his stress-response system would be the kind that “fires responses and fires ’em harder.” His heart would beat faster, stress hormones would flood his body, his tissues would swell up, and white blood cells would swarm out to protect him against assault. If this state of inflamed arousal subsided quickly, it would be harmless. But if the man stayed on high alert for years at a time, then his blood pressure would rise, and the part of his immune system that fends off smaller, subtler threats, like viruses, would not do its job.

And he was right. The social experience that most reliably predicted whether an HIV-positive gay man would die quickly, Cole found, was whether or not he was in the closet. Closeted men infected with HIV died an average of two to three years earlier than out men. When Cole dosed AIDS-infected white blood cells with norepinephrine, a stress hormone, the virus replicated itself three to ten times faster than it did in non-dosed cells. Cole mulled these results over for a long time, but couldn’t understand why we would have been built in such a way that loneliness would interfere with our ability to fend off disease: “Did God want us to die when we got stressed?”

The answer is no.

What He wanted is for us not to be alone. Or rather, natural selection favored people who needed people. Humans are vastly more social than most other mammals, even most primates, and to develop what neuroscientists call our social brain, we had to be good at cooperating. To raise our children, with their slow-maturing cerebral cortexes, we needed help from the tribe. To stoke the fires that cooked the meat that gave us the protein that sustained our calorically greedy gray matter, we had to organize night watches. But compared with our predators, we were small and weak. They came after us with swift strides. We ran in a comparative waddle.

“The very fact that [loneliness] can affect the genes like that—it’s huge,” Suomi says. “It changes the way one thinks about development.”

So what would happen if one of us wandered off from her little band, or got kicked out of it because she’d slacked off or been caught stealing? She’d find herself alone on the savanna, a fine treat for a bunch of lions. She’d be exposed to attacks from marauders. If her nervous system went into overdrive at perceiving her isolation, well, that would have just sent her scurrying home. Cacioppo thinks we’re hardwired to find life unpleasant outside the safety of trusted friends and family, just as we’re pre-programmed to find certain foods disgusting. “Why do you think you are ten thousand times more sensitive to foods that are bitter than to foods that are sweet?” Cacioppo asked me. “Because bitter’s dangerous!”

One of those alone-on-the-savanna moments in our modern lives occurs when we go off to college, because we have to make a whole new set of friends. Back in the mid-’90s, when Cacioppo was at Ohio State University (he is now at the University of Chicago), he and his colleagues sorted undergraduates into three groups—the non-lonely, the sort-of-sometimes lonely, and the lonely. The researchers then strapped blood- pressure cuffs, biosensors, and beepers onto the students. Nine times a day for seven days, they were beeped and had to fill out questionnaires. Cacioppo also kept them overnight in the university hospital with “nightcaps” on their heads, monitoring the length and quality of their rest. He took saliva samples to measure levels of cortisol, a hormone produced under stress.

As expected, he found the students with bodily symptoms of distress (poor sleep, high cortisol) were not the ones with too few acquaintances, but the ones who were unhappy about not having made close friends. These students also had higher than normal vascular resistance, which is caused by the arteries narrowing as their tissue becomes inflamed. High vascular resistance contributes to high blood pressure; it makes the heart work harder to pump blood and wears out the blood vessels. If it goes on for a long time, it can morph into heart disease. While Cole discovered that loneliness could hasten death in sick people, Cacioppo showed that it could make well people sick—and through the same method: by putting the body in fight-or-flight mode.

A famous experiment helps explain why rejection makes us flinch. It was conducted more than a decade ago by Naomi Eisenberger, a social psychologist at UCLA, along with her colleagues. People were brought one-by-one into the lab to play a multiplayer online game called “Cyberball” that involved tossing a ball back and forth with two other “people,” who weren’t actually people at all, but a computer program. “They” played nicely with the real person for a while, then proceeded to ignore her, throwing the ball only to each other. Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans showed that the experience of being snubbed lit up a part of the subjects’ brains (the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex) that also lights up when the body feels physical pain.

I asked Eisenberger why, if the same part of our brain processes social insult and bodily injury, we don’t confuse the two. She explained that physical harm simultaneously lights up another neural region as well, one whose job is to locate the ache—on an arm or leg, inside the body, and so on. What the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex registers is the emotional fact that pain is distressing, be it social or physical. She calls this the “affective component” of pain. In operations performed to relieve chronic pain, doctors have lesioned, or disabled, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. After the surgery, the patients report that they can still sense where the trouble comes from, but, they add, it just doesn’t bother them anymore.

It’s tempting to say that the lonely were born that way—it’d let the rest of us off the hook. And, as it turns out, we’d be about half right, because loneliness is about half heritable. A longitudinal study of more than 8,000 identical Dutch twins found that, if one twin reported feeling lonely and unloved, the other twin would report the same thing 48 percent of the time. This figure held so steady across the pairs of twins—young or old, male or female, notwithstanding different upbringings—that researchers concluded that it had to reflect genetic, not environmental, influence. To understand what it means for a personality trait to have 48 percent heritability, consider that the influence of genes on a purely physical trait is 100 percent. Children get the color of their eyes from their parents, and that is that. But although genes may predispose children toward loneliness, they do not account for everything that makes them grow up lonely. Fifty-two percent of that comes from the world.

Evolutionary theory, which has a story for everything, has a story to illustrate how the human species might benefit from wide variations in temperament. A group that included different personality types would be more likely to survive a radical change in social conditions than a group in which everyone was exactly alike. Imagine that, after years in which a group had lived in peace, an army of strangers suddenly appeared on the horizon. The tribe in which some men stayed behind while the rest headed off on a month-long hunting expedition (the stay-at-homes may have been less adventurous, or they may just have been loners) had a better chance of repelling the invaders, or at least of saving the children, than the tribe whose men had all enthusiastically wandered off, confident that everything would be fine back home.

And yet loneliness is made as well as given, and at a very early age. Deprive us of the attention of a loving, reliable parent, and, if nothing happens to make up for that lack, we’ll tend toward loneliness for the rest of our lives. Not only that, but our loneliness will probably make us moody, self-doubting, angry, pessimistic, shy, and hypersensitive to criticism. Recently, it has become clear that some of these problems reflect how our brains are shaped from our first moments of life.

Proof that the early brain is molded by love comes, in part, from another notorious natural experiment: the abandonment of tens of thousands of Romanian orphans born during the regime of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, who had banned birth control. A great deal has been written about the heartbreaking emotional and educational difficulties of these children, who grew up 20 to a nurse in Dickensian orphanages. In the age of the brain scan, we now know that those institutionalized children’s brains developed less “gray matter”—that is, fewer of the neurons that make up the bulk of the brain—and that, if those children never went on to be adopted, they’d sprout less “white matter,” too. White matter helps send signals from one part of the brain to another; think of it as the mind’s internal Internet. In the orphans’ case, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex—which are involved in memory, emotions, decision-making, and social interaction—just weren’t connecting.

There’s a limit to how much we can poke around inside lonely humans, for obvious reasons. That’s why a great deal of research on the biological effects of a lonely childhood involves monkeys. Last year, I visited a monkey lab in the rolling farmland of rural Maryland run by a burly and affable psychologist-turned- primatologist named Steve Suomi. Suomi conducts his experiments on rhesus macaques, adorable little creatures sometimes called a “weed species,” because they, like humans, thrive in most environments they’re thrown into.

Suomi is building on research begun by his teacher and mentor, Harry Harlow, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin notorious for experiments in the ’50s and ’60s. Harlow subjected newborn rhesus macaques to appalling isolation—months spent in cages in the company only of “surrogate mothers” made of wire with cartoonish monkey heads and bottles attached. Luckier monkeys had that and cloth-covered versions of the same thing to cuddle. (It is remarkable what a soft cloth can do to calm an anxious baby monkey down.) In the most extreme cases, the babies languished alone at the bottom of a V-shaped steel container. Cruel as these experiments were, Harlow proved that the absence of mothering destroyed the monkeys’ ability to mingle with other monkeys, though the “cloth mother” could mitigate the worst effects of isolation. Years of monkey therapy were required to integrate them into the troop. Harlow’s insights were not well received. Behaviorists, who reigned in U.S. psychology departments, held a blank-slate view of animal and human behavior. They scoffed at the notion that baby monkeys could be hard-wired for love, or at least for a certain quality of touch.

Times have changed, and Harlow’s conviction that nature demands nurture is now the common view. (Changing laws also mean that Suomi would have a harder time getting away with such experiments, which he’s not inclined to do anyway.) What Suomi has that Harlow did not have is technology. By shipping off monkey tissue to laboratories, such as Steve Cole’s, that have machines capable of seeing which genes are turned on and which are turned off, Suomi can show that loneliness transforms the brain and body. He can match the behavior of the lonely monkeys as they grow—what they act like, where they rank in dominance hierarchies when they’re introduced into a troop, whether they ever manage to reproduce—with the activity of genes that affect their brains and immune systems.

Suomi raises his monkeys in three groups, one group confined entirely to the company of peers (a chaotic, Lord of the Flies kind of childhood); another group left alone with terry-cloth mother-surrogates, except when released for a couple of hours a day to scamper with fellow babies; and the third raised by their mothers. What he found is that, in monkeys separated from their mothers in the first four months of life, some important immunity-related genes show a different pattern of expression. Among these were genes that help make the protein that inflames tissue and genes that tell the body to ward off viruses and other microbes.

Suomi was also excited about results coming in from peer-raised monkeys’ brain tissue: Thousands of little changes in genetic activity had been detected in their prefrontal cortexes. This region is sometimes called the “CEO” of the brain; it restrains violent impulses and inappropriate behavior. (In humans, faulty wiring in the prefrontal cortex has been associated with schizophrenia and ADHD.) Some of the aberrations were on genes that direct growth of the brain; modifications of those were bound to result in altered neural architecture. These findings eerily echoed the Romanian orphans’ brain scans and suggested that the lonely monkeys were going to be weirder than the others.

Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking.

“The very fact that something outside the organism can affect the genes like that—it’s huge,” Suomi says. “It changes the way one thinks about development.” I didn’t need genetics, though, to see how defective the peer-raised monkeys’ development had been. Suomi took me outside to watch them. They huddled in nervous groups at the back of the cage, holding tight to each another. Sometimes, he said, they invite aggression by cowering; at other times, they fail to recognize and kowtow to the alpha monkeys, so they get picked on even more. The most perturbed monkeys might rock, clutch at themselves, and pull out their own hair, looking for all the world like children with severe autism.

Suomi added that good foster care could greatly improve the troubled macaques’ lives. He pointed out some who had been given over to foster grandmothers. Not only did they act more monkey-like, but, he told me, about half of their genetic deviations had vanished, too.

If we now know that loneliness, a social emotion, can reach into our bodies and rearrange our cells and genes, what should we do about it? We should change the way we think about health. James Heckman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist at the University of Chicago who tabulates the costs of early childhood deprivation, speaks bitterly of “silos” in health policy, meaning that we see crime and low educational achievement as distinct from medical problems like obesity or heart disease. As far as he’s concerned, these are, in too many cases, symptoms of the same social disorder: the failure to help families raise their children. Heckman believes that the life of a child at the lower end of the U.S. socioeconomic spectrum is starting to look more like the life of one of Suomi’s lonely macaques. As nearly half of all marriages continue to end in divorce, as marriage itself floats further out of reach for the undereducated and financially strapped, childhood has become a more solitary and chaotic experience. Single mothers don’t have a lot of time to spend with their children, nor, in most cases, money for emotionally enriching social activities.

“As inequality has increased, childhood inequality has increased,” Heckman said, “So has inequality of parenting.” For the first time in 30 years, mental health disabilities such as ADHD outrank physical ones among American children. Heckman doesn’t think that’s only because parents seek out attention-deficit diagnoses when their children don’t come home with A’s. He thinks it’s also because emotional impoverishment embeds itself in the body. “Mothers matter,” he says, “and mothering is in short supply.”

Heckman has been analyzing data from two famous early-childhood intervention programs, the Abecedarian Project of the ’70s and the Perry Preschool project of the ’60s. Both have furnished ample evidence that, if you enroll very young children from poor families in programs that give both them and their parents an extra boost, then they grow up to be wealthier and healthier than their counterparts—less fat, less sick, better educated, and, for men, more likely to hold down a job. In the case of the Perry Preschool, Heckman estimated that each dollar invested yielded $7 to $12 in savings over the span of decades. One of the most effective economic and social policies, he told me, would be “supplementing the parenting environment of disadvantaged young children.”

If you can’t change society all at once, though, you can change it a few people at a time. Cacioppo and a colleague, Louise Hawkley, have been developing programs to teach lonely people to get along better with others. At one point, the psychologists thought of designing a mobile app, a sort of electronic nagging mother, to help people break bad social habits. (You’d check an item off the list, say, if you remembered to talk to anyone that day—a store clerk or a librarian.) But they didn’t get funding for the software, so now they’re focusing on a simpler and more low-tech fix. It’s a seminar with an instructor and a pointer and a screen in which students learn to read faces and interpret voices and also to stop making the assumption that lonely people seem prone to make, which is that every person they meet is judging or rebuffing them. What they’re learning, says Hawkley, is the art of “social cognition.” Her goal is to show people that they come at the world full of “assumptions about human nature, about social mores, that aren’t necessarily accurate.”

Cacioppo and Hawkley have been testing their social-cognition curriculum on Army bases, holding classes to hone soldiers’ social skills and teach platoon leaders to spot the lonely in their ranks and help them fit in better. The results aren’t in yet, U.S. Army psychologist Major Paul Lester told me, but he has been receiving reports that suggest that people who have gone through the training fall prey to post-traumatic stress disorder less often. Lester insisted that I add that the Army hadn’t agreed to spend $50 million a year for this experiment only because it’s worried about suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder— although if loneliness training brought down the number of suicidal and dysfunctional soldiers, so much the better. The Army sees the classes as essential training for coping with military life. The best fighting comes from soldiers who interact well with other soldiers, said Lester, and soldiers’ lives are full of social disruption—transfers from base to base and so on.

These are patch solutions, obviously, though it’s appealing to imagine a social-cognition program filtering down and replacing the vague platitudes usually taught to elementary- and middle-schoolers in their human growth and development classes. And it would completely transform a child’s world to have a teacher trained to identify the lonely kids in her classroom and to provide succor and support once she’d found them. Naomi Eisenberger pointed out to me that, while schools take physical pain very seriously, they usually trivialize social pain: “You cannot hit other students, but oftentimes, there are no rules about excluding another student,” she said.

Cole can imagine giving people medications to treat loneliness, particularly when it exacerbates chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure. These could be betablockers, which reduce the physical effects of stress; anti-inflammatory medicine; or even Tylenol—since physical and emotional pain overlap, it turns out that Tylenol can reduce the pain of heartbreak.

At a deeper level, though, loneliness research forces us to acknowledge our own extraordinary malleability in the face of social forces. This susceptibility is both terrifying and exhilarating. On the terrifying side is the unhappy fact that isolation, especially when it stems from the disenfranchisement of the underprivileged, creates a bodily limitation all too easily reproduced in each successive generation. Given that we have been scaling back the kinds of programs that could help people overcome such disadvantages and that many in Congress, mostly Republicans, have been trying to defund exactly the kind of behavioral science research that could yield even better programs, we have reason to be afraid. But there’s something awe-inspiring about our resilience, too. Put an orphan in foster care, and his brain will repair its missing connections. Teach a lonely person to respond to others without fear and paranoia, and over time, her body will make fewer stress hormones and get less sick from them. Care for a pet or start believing in a supernatural being and your score on the UCLA Loneliness Scale will go down. Even an act as simple as joining an athletic team or a church can lead to what Cole calls “molecular remodeling.” “One message I take away from this is, ‘Hey, it’s not just early life that counts,’ ” he says. “We have to choose our life well.”

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The PKK expressed concern over an apparent increase of Turkish troop movements and reconnaissance drones on Tuesday. During a negotiated withdrawal in 1999, the Turkish military ambushed Kurdish fighters, killing an estimated 500 people. Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtas said, “We have no doubt about the state but fear provocation from dark forces.” There was, however, no sign of military activity on Wednesday. The first fighters are expected to arrive in northern Iraq’s Qandil mountains in a week. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has criticized the timeline of the withdrawal, stressing that the fighters should disarm before leaving. But, this was rejected by the PKK, which feared the departing forces would come under assault.

Foreign Policy Magazine – May 8, 2013

This is a letter just released from Eskinder Nega, a peaceful blogger and democracy activist serving an 18-year sentence in Kaliti jail in Addis Ababa, courtesy of the Ethiopian government supported by World Bank, US, and UK aid:

Individuals can be penalised, made to suffer (oh, how I miss my child) and even killed. But democracy is a destiny of humanity which can not be averted. It can be delayed but not defeated.

…I accept my fate, even embrace it as serendipitous. I sleep in peace, even if only in the company of lice, behind bars. The same could not be said of my incarcerator though they sleep in warm beds, next to their wives, in their home.

Why should the rest of the world care? Horace said it best: mutate nomine de te tabula narratur. “Change only the name and this story is also about you.” Where ever justice suffers our common humanity suffers, too.

I will live to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It may or may not be a long wait. Whichever way events may go, I shall persevere.

Tourists and residents stroll along Kobmagergade in Copenhagen. Kierkegaard was confirmed in a church just down the street.

For years, visitors to the Copenhagen City Museum wandered into a modest room that contains a few artifacts from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s life: portraits, meerschaum pipes, first editions and, best of all, the desk where he stood and produced with preternatural speed a series of original and difficult works, many of them written pseudonymously and published in editions that numbered in the hundreds — among them “Either-Or,” “Fear and Trembling,” “The Concept of Dread” and “Repetition.” The exhibit has been refreshed to mark Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday on May 5th. His belongings — a large library, furniture, paintings, and knickknacks —were pretty well dispersed after his death in 1855, but the expanded version will add an “outer circle” of relevant material. Manuscripts and papers from the Kierkegaard archives will be on display at the Royal Library.

Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms helped express the spiritual and deeply personal.

The philosopher’s grave is fairly close by, in Assistens Kirkegaard—his forbidding name is a variation of the Danish word for cemetery — in the Norrebro district, which is also the burial ground of many other notable figures, including Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr and the American tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.

Though in death he rests in this distinguished company, Kierkegaard was markedly less revered in life. His contemporaries saw him as a troublesome, quarrelsome figure. He was a familiar sight, strolling about the Old City, where he created the illusion that he was merely an underemployed gentleman. The satirical weekly Corsair published nasty caricatures of him and mocked his writing and pseudonymous disguises. He was gossiped about when he broke his engagement to the 18-year-old Regine Olsen, and was feared by his targets, among them, Hans Christian Andersen, whose early novels Kierkegaard eviscerated in his 1838 debut, “From the Papers of One Still Living.” Shortly before he died at age 42, he began a bitter ground war with the state Lutheran church. For his biographers and interpreters, his private life remains a nest of secrets.

For all his well-known existential explorations — his fascination with life’s dreadful uncertainties and his belief, set forth in “The Sickness Unto Death,” that despair is central to the human condition — Kierkegaard will forever be associated with the “leap,” an exertion of faith that helped him accept what he saw as the absurd idea that Jesus was simultaneously divine and yet much like other young men of his time; the question obsessed and perplexed him. As he put it in his major 1846 book “Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophic Fragments,” “The Absurd is that the eternal truth has come to exist, that God has come to exist, is born, has grown up and so on, and has become just like a person, impossible to tell apart from another person.” Kierkegaard called this “the Absolute Paradox.”

These were awkward questions for discussion in a public forum — particularly in a small 19th-century monarchy with a dominant church. Kierkegaard came to realize that the subjects he cared most about — spiritual, deeply personal, wordless even — did not lend themselves to straightforward discourse. So he found a new way to communicate, letting his various pseudonymous “authors” say what a pedagogical doctor of theology could not. This was the Socratic method in epic form. It allowed Constantin Constantius in “Repetition” to hint that life might indeed be lived over; and it let Johannes de Silentio in “Fear and Trembling” retell the biblical story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac and to introduce what he called the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” the idea that one could disregard society’s legal and ethical boundaries in favor of a higher law. It was a dazzling thought experiment, and somewhat frightening, especially when you consider its extreme, all-too-familiar modern-day applications.

This subversive approach — “indirect communication” was the term he used repeatedly in “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” — was a way of saying: “Here is a secret that I cannot tell you — in fact, to say it outright would ruin it. Yet even without saying it, I think you get the idea.” Perceptive readers did get the idea without being told explicitly what it was.

This technique is familiar today; it’s what we experience in public debate, more widely with every advance in communications technology. The best commercial and political advertisements demonstrate it. Political candidates know that speaking directly to voters, telling them precisely what they stand for, may only be asking for trouble and that there are more effective ways to broadcast their views. The “dog-whistling” of modern campaigns —seemingly innocuous language used by surrogates and press officers to spread unruly opinions — is a method that Johannes Climacus, the “author” of the “Postscript,” would recognize.

Subjectivity (“inderlighed”), Kierkegaard wrote —in an almost contemptuous dismissal of the rational systems of 19th-century German philosophy — is truth. Yet inwardness and subjective reflection doesn’t leave much room for open discussion. Thus, he became the poet of the unsaid, the inexpressible — an artist-philosopher drawn to the mystery of powerful silence. It is a cliché to say that ideas matter, but they may matter more, and may be far more effective when they are communicated, as Kierkegaard suggested, without the intrusive voice of an insistent author. That’s one reason why, 200 years after his birth, in ways that are not always immediately apparent, Kierkegaard still matters.

Jeffrey Frank is the author of “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage” and a co-translator from the Danish of “The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen.” opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

“All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendancy over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of principles by which they may be guided. We live by myth. ‘Myth’ is not falsehood; on the contrary, the great and ancient myths are profoundly true.

“The myth of Prometheus will always be a high poetic representation of an ineluctable truth, and so will the myth of Pandora. A myth may grow out of an actual event almost lost in the remote past, but it comes to transcend the particular circumstances of its origin, assuming a significance universal and abiding. Nor is a myth simply a work of fancy: true myth is only represented, never created, by a poet. Prometheus and Pandora were not invented by the solitary imagination of Hesiod. Real myths are the product of the moral experience of a people, groping toward divine love and wisdom—implanted in a people’s consciousness, before the dawn of history, by a power and a means we never have been able to describe in terms of mundane knowledge.”