In The New Atlantis, Alan Jacobs writes about Richard John Neuhaus’s final book before his passing this year, American Babylon:
This is the model of exile which Neuhaus recommends to American Jews and Christians: “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile.” We build our houses and plant our gardens and marry and raise children as though we are in our homeland—but we are not in our homeland. Neuhaus refers to “this our awkward duality of citizenship,” and it is awkward—psychologically, socially, strategically. Yet Neuhaus passionately and convincingly makes the case that it is necessary: the alternatives to such delicate balance are a self-imposed isolation from the public sphere that tends to make people both arrogant and ineffectual, and (the much more common path among Christians) an uncritical identification of the Biblical story with the American story.
Later on, Jacobs wonders whether Neuhaus may have missed much of where the future of the public square—and the exile of believers—has already begun to reside.
But as I read this fine and moving book I found myself thinking that there is a greater lacuna in it—a gap that future political theologians must fill, if Jews and Christians are to navigate their exile successfully. This is Neuhaus’s neglect of the fact that the public square, about which he wrote so eloquently for so long, has over the past decade been transmuted, has taken on a new and largely virtual form. And this transmutation surely has great implications for the theology of exile. Think of the thousands of American churches not just with websites, but with Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Think of the resources the Internet places at the fingertips of Christian homeschoolers, or the social and spiritual worlds available through the Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center, with its video lectures and audio classes and articles by the hundreds.
Continue reading at The New Atlantis.