I awoke this morning from a frightening and sad dream. And I was struck how instantly I tried to rush from the sadness to happiness, to reassure myself that "all's right in the world ... It was just a dream". Why did I do that? 1. The precursor to the human smile was the caveman's grimace. The invention of dentistry is the main difference between this threatening grimace and the polite social convention of the modern smile. 2. In the Protestant West today, smiling has become a moral imperative. The smile is regarded as the objective externalisation of a well ordered life. Sadness is moral failure. 3. The motif of late-capitalist society is the stylization of happiness, the cultivation of lifestyles from which every trace of sadness has been expunged. Peter Berger identified "the Protestant smile" as part of Protestantism's cultural heritage in the West. In a Catholic country like France, it's still cons...
A "restless" theologian in service to the church of Jesus Christ