Monthly Archives: February 2008

I’ve been reading an interesting book (if you’re a policy wonk like me) called The Utility of Force. It’s by a British general and military historian who explores the changing ability of military force to be useful politically, or as the author puts it, to "have utility."

It got me thinking about the word "utility" and its application to other things. Instead of saying "Is this useful?" you ask "Does this object have utility?" To me the first question is more about the object’s usefulness to you, while the second is more about the object’s usefulness to anyone. There is also the question of exactly what the utility is — a hammer has a somewhat limited utility, while a computer has an almost infinite utility, depending on the software available for it.

So, here’s the question of this posting: Does a church have utility? And if so, to whom and for what?

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You know, I’m really getting tired of religion.
I don’t mean spirituality, necessarily, and I certainly don’t mean the practice of Christlikeness. But I surely do mean the earthly-focused, useless, institutional, powerless, unexamined fabric of delusions and rituals that pass for Christianity in many churches and places.
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