What was surprising was not the informality of your note ”” everyone knows that for public relations folks, journalists are on an automatic first-name basis ”” but that it came from Marie Claire magazine. Fashion writing has not loomed large in this column.
“Today’s hard economic times,” you helpfully explained, “have a profound effect not only on our bank accounts but on our sense of hope and psychological well-being,” an insight, you must admit, that has not escaped millions of Americans, to count only those who still have bank accounts.
Still, you announced that it had inspired an article in the current issue of Marie Claire featuring accounts by “five modern career gals” of “how their belief in faith helped them through the hardest of struggles.”
The article is titled “Cheaper Than Therapy.”
This article made me feel sick at heart.
Hopes rose when I began reading the column and then were dashed. But for sanity’s sake all I have to do is look across the families at Mass: good people, all. Yes some are struggling. But none, or at least very few, are caught up in the kind of narcissism which in the article masquerades as religion.
Two thoughts here. First, the “mainline” churches (or should that be “oldline”…?) have been promoting secularization for decades. That may account for the cultural tendency to assume the spiritual is only therapeutic. Second, please read the chapter on spirituality in David Brooks’ [b]Bobos in Paradise[/b]…goes a long way toward explaining the [i]Marie Claire[/i] angle.