David Brooks on Why We Need Words Like Sin and Redemption

By Published on May 2, 2015

David Brooks wants you to be in a Bible study. You’ll get more out of it than you would at a dinner party, he says, if you find places where you can talk about pain and suffering. In preparation for his new book, “The Road to Character,” the New York Times columnist read many religious authors, including early Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo. “I now consider Augustine the smartest human being I’ve ever encountered in any form,” he says. Brooks, who is Jewish, has admiration for many Christian authors, but he also explains how he struggles with theological tensions with Christianity. This interview has been edited for length. . . .

Is organized religion central to improving your character or can you do it on your own?

I’ve met some amazingly wonderful people who are atheists, and I’ve met some amazingly wonderful people who are orthodoxly faithful. My observation is that you don’t need God to be good. I do think you need the vocabulary that religion has offered us. If you’re going to think of your own eternal life, you need words like sin and soul and redemption. You need a vocabulary to talk about moral issues, and in our civilization, that vocabulary is religious vocabulary. For example, Abraham Lincoln was a profoundly good person, but it’s not clear what his faith was. That’s a matter for debate. He was raised with the King James Bible. He did have a deeply moral vocabulary which came out in the second inaugural.

 

Read the article “David Brooks on Why We Need Words Like Sin and Redemption” on washingtonpost.com.

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