If you want to know why Andrew Sullivan has such a huge readership, look no further than this lovely bit of confession that surfaced on his blog yesterday:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/believing-throu.html#more
Despite being a generation older than most of his readers, he expresses precisely the feeling so many of us share, of being a living soul in an ash-heap of dying institutions. As I think about the people I love most, I almost can say that I know of no one who derives life and happiness from an institution: churches, schools, businesses, charities, and countries alike all fail for us. This is not merely because I know only one sort of person. This feeling that any membership is at best a leaving behind of one’s best parts, and at worst a betrayal of one’s purpose in life, is felt by friends in schools, universities, law, the corporate world, start-ups, music, publishing, unions, neighborhoods, and religions. And this may be mere solipsism, but I feel Sullivan’s words particularly keenly: can the alienation get any more intense than for educated upper-middle-class American Catholic idealists with a conservative bent? Cicero said that trust (fides) is the foundation of all civil society. Is there any place where abuse of this trust has not become policy?
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