IrvingD

Since I was 13, a church on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street in New York City has been a place where, through the years, I keep returning. Like the stone columns and arches that hold up the ceiling 95 feet from the floor, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue stands like a rock of unchangeable certainty in the forty-three years since I've poked my curious eyes into the front doors. I am not a member of St. Thomas, nor am I ever likely to become one. I do not even attend the church on a regular basis. Yet it has become for me a symbol of the greater reality to which it points and for which it was dedicated. Completed in 1913, this work of architect Bertram Goodhue boasts with justification as being one of the great architectural monuments in the country as it holds a position as both a National and New York City Landmark. By no means Goodhue's best work--he considered the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue and 66th St. his masterpiece--St. Thomas nevertheles...

Last Saturday, I accompanied my wife and daughter on a shopping trip to Manhattan. One of the stores we entered was American Eagle Outfitters, a clothing shop for teenagers and young adults. A salesperson greeted us with the usual can-I-help-you greeting as I pointed to my daughter and said, "No, but you can help her." Feeling a bit out of place in this emporium of youth, I spotted an empty chair next to a display table and headed straight towards it as a respite for tired feet. My wife wandered to some other part of the store while I amused myself with my Blackberry. Moments later, my wife returned with an observation that the store had no visible order to it. Lingerie lingered among hats and shirts, socks among pants and skirts. There were no sections where one could focus on a single item of clothing. Just stuff here and there. Suddenly it hit me. This is a Postmodern shop. This is Postmodernism! Forget all those convoluted definitions or attempts at definitions. Begone wi...

I was reading my weekend NY Times Book Review and came across a review of a new book critiquing the cult of Positive Thinking. The reviewer describes Positive Thinking as an All-American phenomenon that "bears little relation to genuine hope or happiness." She agrees with the basic premise of the book that Positive Thinking is a "delusional and infuriating belief system that arose as a late 19th and early 20th Century reaction against the predominant Calvinism emphasis on sin and guilt." According to the reviewer, a "dour Calvinism" was replaced by something "equally oppressive" in the form of the Positive Thinking movement. She cites Dale Carnegie's 1936 opus, How to Win Friends and Influence People as the primeval motivational text, especially in the business community where Positive Thinking and motivational speaking has taken on nearly sacred proportions. I must confess that I wish I had written this book because it captures all the thi...

Meeting with some old friends this weekend, I had the pleasure of catching up with our coming and goings over the past nine years. As with all really good friends, we just picked up from where we were before and ran the video of our lives fast forward to the present moment. The most dramatic was the growing up of our children. With our daughter on the cusp of turning eighteen, our friends expressed their surprise at how she had grown up in the past decade. Their own daughter, at twelve, is a maturing young lady who interacted well with our daughter. We were proud of both girls. The current of our conversation, however, turned around a church we both worked at those many years ago. Our friend, Louisa, was the director of the after-school program and I was the pastor of a mainline Protestant church in Bayside, a neighborhood in the Borough of Queens in New York City. Our relationship with the leadership of that church led us into some of the most convoluted arrangements of power dynamics...