HONOR {Robinson}
In the First Epistle of Peter we are told to honor everyone, and I have never been in a situation where I felt this instruction was inappropriate. When we accept dismissive judgements of our community we stop having generous hopes for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests. The cultural disaster called ‘dumbing down,’ which swept through every significant American institution and grossly impoverished civic and religious life, was and is the result of this obsessive devaluing of the lives that happen to pass on this swath of continent. On average, in the main, we are Christian people, if the polls are to be believed. How is Christianity consistent with this generalized contempt that seems to lie behind so much so-called public discourse?...
[W]hen we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general that demeans them, we impoverish them and ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditation in short stories and novels. In the same way we diminish the worth of the institutions of society—law, journalism, education, and religion as well, when we forget respect and love for the imagined other, the man or woman or child we will never know, who will take the good from these institutions that we invest in them, or who will be harmed or disheartened because our institutions are warped by meagerness and cynicism.
—Marilynne Robinson, ‘Imagination and Community,’ When I Was a Child I Read Books
December 30, 2014