A mailing list I am on shared an article which I am not going to be easily able to find again now, but which was rather significant.
The author claimed that the political polarization we are experiencing is a large-scale effect of the distribution of left-brain-dominance and right-brain-dominance in the population. Not exactly a new idea, but he had a novel spin on it: that it is the left who are left-brained, and the right who are right-brained.
His reasoning is that it is the leftists who get caught up in grandiose theorizing, and it is the right who are more grounded and in tune with their surroundings.
I think he is to some extent on the wrong track there, and that it may come down to how people integrate the workings of both hemispheres. A leftist may have a grandiose theory, but they will also have strong feelings about that theory, and it is the feelings which confirm them in discounting any and all challenges to the theory. At the same time, many of them can live very strongly in the present, and very relationally, without necessarily connecting anything that happens there to their ideological model.
For myself, I am very concerned that my theories actually be correct, which involves a great deal of seeking out, weighing, and arranging new information. Much of the time, that is motivated by a feeling that I don't have something quite right. Other times, it is spurred on by something God has shown me in my Bible reading, or elsewhere. And I tend to do this absentmindedly, unless I am looking for information in the immediate vicinity.
The bigger problem, though, is the corresponding polarization in the Church. Jesus said to stay unified, and that is clearly not happening.
A boomer apologizes, albeit without much clarity.
"It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs," Jesus said; Matthew 15:26.
I recently understood that I am spending my life in rebuilding spiritual and practical foundations that had been foolishly undermined by previous generations.
Several months ago I was reading a nonfiction book by Christian author Paul Tournier, and made it about three-quarters of the way through before being drawn away to other things.
When I picked it up this last week and finished reading it, I found references to about a dozen Bible passages that had come up in my daily Bible readings in the interim, mostly obscure Old Testament personages with a variety of afflictions; Tournier was a Swiss doctor famous for connecting his Christianity with his medical practice.
I also read a Christian fiction book this last week: Deadline, by Randy Alcorn. One day, what I read in the book mirrored my morning Bible reading on that same day.
"A work of creation was three-fold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly; the Creative Idea, timeless and passionate, which is the image of the Father; the Creative Energy, begotten of the idea and working in time, which is the image of the Word; the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the individual soul, which is the image of the indwelling Spirit."
-- P. D. James, summarizing Dorothy L. Sayers' description
