Take & Read: Theology

By Paul J. Griffiths
University of Notre Dame Press

The General Social Survey, a large-scale study that has surveyed American attitudes and feelings for 50 years, has noted a sharp decline in the well-being of both adults and adolescents. A steep drop starts in the survey around 2012 and is especially pronounced among teenagers. This decrease in happiness stands in inverse proportion to the rise in depression, suicide, self-harm, addiction, and alcohol-related liver disease—all instances of a new term in our smartphone, social media, lockdown era: deaths of despair. Regret, wishing that an aspect of life was otherwise, is one of the feelings occasioned by a life lived in front of a screen. Paul Griffiths’s slim but painstaking book examines the specific contours of this timeless struggle. Avoiding the simple distinction between shame and guilt, Griffiths thinks theologically about regret in a manner that gestures toward Easter. He shows how regret can be the first tool in a technology of the heart, one that works repentance. In this way, he identifies how the feeling with which many now wrestle is, in fact, necessary for their being made whole by the gospel.