Metropolis, Megachurch, and the Towns of Rural America

I am not going to say much here. I know that is surprising, for the title was so ambitious, but I am merely going to point a thing or two out, and leave it to you to do the rest.

There is an article in the Daily Yonder, a publication geared towards rural America:  
Rural Social Activism, Born in a Stable
By Timothy Collins
http://www.dailyyonder.com/rural-social-activism-manger/2012/12/17/5546

...Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister and leading Social Gospel theologian, outlined the movement’s principles in A Theology for the Social Gospel in 1917. Echoing the title of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Encyclical Rerum Novarum, that sought justice for workers, Rauschenbusch wrote: “The new thing in the social gospel is the clearness and insistence with which it sets forth the necessity and the possibility of redeeming the historical life of humanity from ... social wrongs.... Its chief interest is concentrated on those manifestations of sin and redemption which lie beyond the individual soul.”

This reminds me mightily of what I was trying to discover in talking about the group mind or the extended mind:  we have a nation full of good individuals who go on to form extended groups, crowds, and factions, that are anything but good.

Megachurches have not addressed the Spiritual Evolution to the attainment of a higher morality of the group mind. Megachurches come about by the simple logic that there was an injunction to go forth and teach, and the way we judge success in any endeavour is the absolute numbers of heads under our tent or marquee.

The Metropolis is a similar misbegotten creature, large and lumbering and unenlightened. Ditto for the Nation State.

In this so-called era of Globalization, the minds of all mankind touch. Whether their touch will be Charity or whether it will be Flint to the Powder is up to us.
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