Hedonist, Disciple or Bourgeois?

me at AmCon:

I recently finished Jenell Williams Paris’s book The End of Sexual Identity. The book is a very mixed bag, but one thing which struck me was a brief mention of a dichotomy which I think Paris was borrowing from someone else: the choice between hedonism and discipleship.

This framing seems to me to miss something crucial, which politically-minded “social conservatives” often also seem to miss. Because of course there’s a third option, the life of bourgeois stability. The life of building up a reasonable income, getting married to somebody your parents approve of, doing well and upholding the standards of your community, burying your dead: all the normalcy Jesus disrupts.

This third option is important to notice for two reasons.

more–I still don’t think I quite nailed what I wanted to say here, but I hope it will provoke better thoughts from others….