What if COVID-19 changes nothing?
People keep saying we’ll be forever transformed by this pandemic. I’m skeptical.
My April issue of Rolling Stone arrived in the mail several weeks after the COVID-19 lockdown went into effect. It seemed unfortunate, looking at the cover and glancing through the stories inside, that the turnaround on print publishing is so slow. Every article seemed out of step with current realities. The magazine focused on what it described as an emergency—not the pandemic, but climate change. While I would in no way dispute the urgency of climate change, it was hard to see it as being anywhere other than on the back burner of our minds at that moment.
The more I thought about it, however, the more that I realized that what Rolling Stone offered me with its slower news cycle was an important perspective on what this pandemic might need to teach us. This particular issue of the magazine opened some theological insight for me about the hope and challenge of Christian apocalyptic thinking.
I keep hearing two competing ideas from people. On the one hand, there are all of those anxious questions about when we can expect to get “back to normal.” This question is tied closely to our collective concern for the economy, as well as our visceral desire to reach out and physically touch one another.
