{"id":9228,"date":"2022-07-01T08:00:37","date_gmt":"2022-07-01T14:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/schaeffersghost\/?p=9228"},"modified":"2022-06-19T10:05:06","modified_gmt":"2022-06-19T16:05:06","slug":"why-the-shoulder-shrug-shouldnt-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/schaeffersghost\/2022\/07\/why-the-shoulder-shrug-shouldnt-win\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the shoulder shrug shouldn’t win"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>
Image: Crossway<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

I admit that I picked up Uche Anizor\u2019s new book\u00a0Overcoming Apathy: Gospel Hope for Those Who Struggle to Care<\/em><\/a> with a bit of a sigh. We live in a world where we\u2019re all supposed to care about everything 100% all the time, until the next thing comes along on social media and then we\u2019re supposed to care about that instead (while pretending that we still care about the thing from last week that we\u2019ve not given another thought to). We\u2019re supposed to feel deeply about January 6, but also the refugee crisis (both the Ukrainian version and the Afghani version), the Me Too movement (especially meaningful in the Southern Baptist world this past week), the war in Ukraine, the price of gas, the general inflation, the feds hiking interest rates, midterm election, the 2024 Presidential election, and President Biden\u2019s bike. No doubt these are all important (maybe excluding the last one), and we\u00a0can\u00a0<\/em>engage passionately with any of them. But do we really have to fully care about them all the time? Is there no place for contentment, even if some want to call that contentment apathy?<\/p>\n

With that in mind I opened up\u00a0Overcoming Apathy<\/em> and read this:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis book is an exploration of apathy. [Which, hey, reasonable enough, given the title] My main concern is spiritual apathy, or indifference toward the core things that Christians should care about.\u201d (11)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh snap. Instead of a book where I keep saying \u2018yeah, that\u2019s important but so is feeding my kids and helping my elderly neighbor and volunteering in my community, and those things often have a greater claim on my attention\u2019 this is a book where we are told that we don\u2019t care enough about holiness and often turn aside from the hard pursuit of a Godly life in favor of the meaningless trifles of this world. In other words, this book is both right and convicting. I\u00a0am\u00a0<\/em>apathetic about the life we have been called to live, and I\u00a0do<\/em> need to overcome that apathy. Granted, there are probably ways in which I need to overcome\u00a0some<\/span> of my apathy about the wider world, but those pale in comparison to the ways I am apathetic about the state of my soul. And this little book is an excellent tonic for that apathy.<\/p>\n

Of course we need to be careful when thinking about something like apathy\u2013is the cause spiritual or physical? Am I apathetic because I am lazy and sinful (which is where I am, for the most part) or because there are underlying causes of depression? Anizor carefully makes this distinction, drawing on both modern and ancient sources (and yes, the ancients knew there was a difference between sin, hunger, and mental illness). While each of these different causes might merit different kinds of attention, they all merit a response such that we are attempting to overcome them as part of our overcoming of apathy.<\/p>\n

All that to say, this book is excellent and will challenge you to look your apathy in the face and overcome it by the atoning work of Christ on the cross.<\/p>\n

Highly recommended.<\/p>\n

Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the\u00a0City of Man Podcast<\/a> an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Profess<\/em>or of Political Science at\u00a0Southwest Baptist University<\/a>\u00a0in Bolivar, MO<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review of “Overcoming Apathy: Gospel Hope for Those Who Struggle to Care” by Uche Anizor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1469,"featured_media":9230,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[1304,777],"class_list":["post-9228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-christian","tag-psychology","tag-theology"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy the shoulder shrug shouldn't win<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Review of "Overcoming Apathy: Gospel Hope for Those Who Struggle to Care" by Uche Anizor\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/schaeffersghost\/2022\/07\/why-the-shoulder-shrug-shouldnt-win\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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