Reader recall Brooks’s War Cry of ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces?’ https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/1949245/the-collapse-of-the-dream-palaces/
Nov 14, 2025
Editor: The final paragraphs of self-congratlatory dreck!
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I got to meet Halik this week at a conference sponsored by the Faith Angle Forum, which brings theologians together with journalists. I attended because I’m looking for a form of Christianity that is more attractive and compelling than Christian nationalism and which we can use to pry people away from that nationalism.
Led by these wise people like Halik and Williams, I now see glimmers of a better way to be faithful in the world. St. Augustine advised us to follow what seems delightful, and in this pilgrim’s way of living I see the delight of pluralism. The world is too complicated to have all its truth encompassed by any single tradition — by Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Enlightenment. You can plant yourself in one and learn from them all.
I see the delight of self-forgetting. As so many sages have told us, if you dive down to the deepest realms of yourself, you find there a desire for self-transcendence that leads you to a highway straight out of self — toward loved ones and friends, toward God. You’re no longer trapped in your small, insecure, self-absorbed self; you’re outward facing, maybe not thinking about yourself much at all.
I see delight in humility. I love Rowan Williams’s definition of humility as a “capacity to be a place where others find rest.” Williams adds that the people Jesus calls blessed “are those who live in welcoming stillness yet are at the same time on fire with longing for the well-being of the neighbor and the healing of the world’s hurts.”
I see, finally, a glimpse of the America I thought I knew. For centuries we have been a hopeful people, a people on the move, defined more by our future than our pasts. Sometimes this relentless passion for growth has led toward gaudy materialism and even exploitation. But American history has been at its best when the passion for spiritual and moral growth has been just as strong. When people have said: I want my heart constantly enlarged, my nation constantly moving toward fairness.
Somehow MAGA has swept in and made us a frightened nation, stagnant, callous and backward. I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever. Eventually Americans, restless as any people on earth, will want to replace threat with hope and resume our national pilgrimage. When that cultural and spiritual shift occurs, a lot will change in our religious and political life.
Editor: David Brooks’s political evolution from War Monger, to an ersatz theological fellow traveler of Tomas Halik, offers the reader an opportunity to view an evolution, of a kind, built on the erasure of a toxic past! Because April 28, 2003 is about self-forgeting, wedded to political opportuism?
Political Cynic
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