As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways\u2014as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader\u2014his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple\u2019s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure\u2014the bitten fruit\u2014and made it a sign of promise and progress\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n
Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress\u2014and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It\u2019s worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn\u2019t say:<\/p>\n
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don\u2019t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It\u2019s life\u2019s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it\u2019s quite true. Your time is limited, so don\u2019t waste it living someone else\u2019s life. Don\u2019t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people\u2019s thinking. Don\u2019t let the noise of others\u2019 opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive\u2014it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver\u2014since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own \u201cinner voice, heart and intuition.\u201d\u2026.<\/p>\n
But the genius of Steve Jobs has been to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world\u2014at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves\u2014will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old clich\u00e9 of \u201cthe Apple faithful\u201d and the \u201ccult of the Mac\u201d is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty, and discarded like a 2001 iPod.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From Andy Crouch\u2019s insightful piece about Steve Jobs: As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways\u2014as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader\u2014his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple\u2019s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,806],"tags":[5422,5916],"class_list":["post-13034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-gospel","tag-andy-crouch","tag-steve-jobs"],"yoast_head":"\n
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