BreakPoint Podcast: Revival or Revolution - The Choice for a Decadent Society with Ross Douthat
Breakpoint
Colson Center
4.8 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2021
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this cultural moment John called for a re-air of an interview with Ross Douthat. Douthat identifies that we live in a decadent society. But when you think of the word "decadent," you probably are thinking, lavish, immoral, wasteful, etc.
But that's not exactly what Douthat means. What he means is a society that is prosperous, powerful, and stuck. Stuck in an economic rut, a creative rut, a political rut; a society that is running out of spiritual and intellectual energy.
Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, John Stonestreet talks with Douthat about his new book, "The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success."
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Breakpoint podcast. I'm John Stone Street. Today on the podcast, I want to revisit an |
| 0:06.1 | interview from earlier this past year in 2020 with author and columnist Ross Douthit. This past year, |
| 0:14.0 | Ross's book that came out was entitled The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. |
| 0:22.1 | It's one of the 30,000 foot views of cultural analysis, and in my mind, it's one of the most |
| 0:28.8 | helpful. The argument that Ross makes in the book is that there's a staleness to a society |
| 0:35.5 | that stops innovating, creating, having a higher purpose, producing |
| 0:42.0 | anything new. And that the only thing that would shake a society from its decadence in history, |
| 0:49.6 | at least from what we know, is either revolution or religious revival. In light of the events of the past |
| 0:55.9 | week, events that kept an awful lot of us glued to our televisions and absolutely shocked, |
| 1:01.7 | those two options seem to emerge and come to the forefront. Are we going to be a civilization |
| 1:08.0 | that faces revolution? Are we going to be a civilization that faces revolution? Are we going to be a civilization that |
| 1:11.6 | faces religious revival? With this is a reality that the Church of Jesus Christ has faced |
| 1:18.6 | from the very beginning. And that is that culture's darkest moments, culture's most difficult |
| 1:23.7 | and confusing moments, are also the greatest opportunities for us to be the church. |
| 1:31.0 | That's a line from Chuck Colson, that the thing the world needs most is for the church to be the |
| 1:36.7 | church. And so I wanted to revisit an interview with some really insightful thoughts about the |
| 1:43.2 | sort of society that we have become. |
| 1:46.3 | Now, to be clear, to understand this interview, we're going to have to go back before the chaos |
| 1:52.3 | of the past week or even the past few months, even the pandemic of 2020, the chaos of the |
| 1:58.0 | past year that left so many of us disoriented and even disheartened to see from a much larger and bigger perspective the sort of society that we've become. |
| 2:08.1 | So here's my interview with Ross Douthit, the author of The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. |
| 2:16.3 | Welcome to the Breakpoint podcast. |
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