Unless you've been living in a cave, the date of June 29th should be etched into your subconscious. It's the day that Apple finally releases the new iPhone [pause for a moment of reverence].
Anyway, with all the hype over the release you knew it was just a matter of time... the exploration of the endless connections between the iPhone and faith has begun. Today Andrew Sullivan tipped off his readers to this article on the faith and the newly approaching iPhone. Here's a sample...
Message here? The quest for, and appreciation of, beauty still exists in the world—and a bitten-into piece of fruit marks
its vanguard.
As an amateur architecture buff I see a parallel at work. While the modernist project in design sought to exalt utilitarianism, banishing what it saw as a superfluous emphasis on the "decorative," the post-modern movement has restored the balance, as if to say, "Sure, functionality is helpful, but in our focus on function the uplift of something bigger went missing."
There's an analogy of faith in this. People want to belong to something that makes greatness manifest in our own time, a movement that can show beauty and achievement as more than just traits of the past. If that weren't true, today's masses wouldn't go to the ends of the earth—or, alternatively, blow thousands of bucks after keeping vigil all night on a strip-mall pavement—to it seek out, bring it home and plug it in.
As far as some of our own are concerned, man's expression of his God-given creativity halted sometime around 1570. But just as there'd be no internet without Gutenberg and no iPhone without Bell, tradition's clock never stops ticking. It extends even into our own time and becomes our responsibility to cultivate, grow and pass forward even richer than we found it, but just as faithful to its beginnings as it was before.
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