A friend recently gave me the very thoughtful present of some gift credit at Hastings, so I toddled off to Hastings to see what I could see. (I wound up getting some blues CDs mostly.) But that is not the point.
While there I noticed (again) the very large section of Christian books in the middle of the store, larger than a number of stand-alone Christian book stores. Then I fell into some postmillennial musing, and wondered about the Christian stock growing and growing, until the only soft porn left in the store was exiled to the periphery. And then the odd juxtaposition of the Christian living rack here and the soft porn there, all under the same roof, channeled through the same cash registers, really struck me.
We are being disciplined by the modern market to live fragmented lives. The world insists upon it. We think we are not affected by it, but we are. Whatever valuable critiques of modernity might be brought by postmodernity, we have to fix it in our minds that postmodern fragmentation is a very great evil, and it is our temptation.