(in)capable?

'...what John Paul the Great termed "the culture of death." We're not talking just about abortion, which kills millions of human beings each year. We're talking about the slow suicide of the West generally. The more sex is detached from marriage and procreation, the less life-giving it becomes—biologically and spiritually. Not only is the birth rate now below replacement level in all "developed" countries; people find it increasingly difficult to see sex in particular and life in general as having any purpose other than self-gratification. For the majority, that means physical self-gratification. Consequently, we are becoming fewer, richer, fatter, and incapable of countering the spiritual energy of militant Islam. Western humanity is becoming a maladapted species. If we don't change, we will die—and deservedly so. The antidote is the Way, the Truth, and the Life: Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man.' (from this blog).

I think it's a good thing that the birthrate is going down in developed countries; I remember when the western part of the US was pretty much open territory where anyone could go and spend a few days alone, and i totally agree with, for example, Thomas Merton, on the value and necessity of solitude. What will we be like when the entire world becomes a theme park like America more and more is, or a slum with boom boxes like Kampala (imitating America) so often strives to be? At any rate, looking at the stats on the number of cheetahs left (or whatever)— I can only hope that the birthrate of the non-developed world (locally, 7 live births per woman) goes down as well.

So it's true. And I'm hardly the first to comment that our relationship to life, to the environment, to ourselves, to the rhythms of nature (our nature) to birth and death, to celebration and life, to anything you can think of, really— are become utterly distorted. "[W]e are becoming fewer, richer, fatter, and incapable of countering the spiritual energy of militant Islam." Or, apparently, of our own kinds of fundamentalism— which, arguably, has historical connections with the quranic ideology of Islam anyway. But what's to be done?

As a seminary teacher in a very definitely Third World country, I constantly wonder: What will it take? Is renewal possible? From whence will it be born? What is "Orthodoxy", here, now, always?