Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

by Marcus J. Borg

A second effect of conventional wisdom is that it tells us how to live. It gets embedded within our minds as we grow up—the central values of our culture. One could make a very good case that the central values of modern Western culture are centered in what I have called the three As—appearance, affluence, and achievement. All of us, at least in the first half of our lives, are to a large extent driven by these values. Driven by these values, we become blind to much else as well as burdened and preoccupied with how we measure up to those values of appearance, affluence, and achievement. The way of Jesus is an invitation out of that kind of life—an invitation into a radically different kind of life.