St. Boniface House

We visit the Wichita Public Library weekly. This is because it is simply outside our financial means to buy the 50-100 books my children check out and read each week. That being said, I have noticed that although we are never the only patrons at the library, we are often one family of only a handful of people at the library at any given day…unless you count the homeless people. If it weren’t an insensitive thing to do, I would probably try to take a picture of this striking evidence of the failure of the Enlightenment social project. The picture, though, would be one you’ve seen before—a massive rectangular edifice of concrete and glass (classic modernist architecture), housing shelf after shelf of books, with virtually no one inside. Outside, however, on every bench, on every short wall, on every step, leaning against every wall, men without jobs or places to live, waiting for the 10 am chimes from the old courthouse to signal the opening of the library, so they can sit inside instead of out.

I had a framed poster when I was in college that exemplified the modernist view of the source of social progress. It was kind of a clever thing (back before just anyone could doctor up photos on their computer) in which a picture of an old-style library complete with index-card cabinets and tables with lights on them (not to mention tons of old books, though interestingly, devoid of people) was made to appear to be underneath (and obviously the foundation of) a modern city complete with massive skyscrapers, with an escalator leading from the one to the other. The moderns believed that all people needed was an education—to learn how to think rationally—and utopia would ensue. Quite the opposite has been the result. Standing outside the second-most important institution of the modernist “education will lead to paradise” paradigm in cities all across America are men whose very presence testifies to the utter failure of the Enlightenment’s Tower of Babel project. And modernity’s most important educational institution is producing hundreds more like them, daily.

Doug Wilson recently noted in his blog that “various liberals are starting to emerge with “gotcha!” observations on the source of the disaster [Hurricane Katrina]– global warming, the U.S. backing out of the Kyoto treaty…RFK, Jr. wrote that Mississippi governor Haley Barbour has been reaping the whirlwind because of his earlier role in arguing for President Bush’s energy policy over against environmental policy” and argued that the time for such concerns are after the rescue efforts have been completed. He’s exactly right, of course. I would bet the farm, though, that the people who are making these sorts of ridiculous claims now are the same ones who saw a red mist when Jerry Falwell and others attributed the 9/11 catastrophe to God’s judgment on certain moral trends in America. In the end, then, what is apparent is that they were not objecting to the claim that “God judges wickedness” nor even “God is judging a particular kind of wickedness” but that they were objecting to that God judging that wickedness. The difference lies in devotion to a different god who has different moral concerns. But it is Yahweh, not the gods of the nations, who rides the clouds (see Deut.33:26, Isa. 19:1; Ps. 68).