What Hemingway’s Life Teaches Us About Institutional Decline
(ANALYSIS) I’m a bit enamored recently with the life of Ernest Hemingway. He was obviously a tremendous writer, maybe one of the finest in our country’s history. But he also lived a life that could charitably be described as “chaotic.”
He moved constantly, was married four times, struggled with alcoholism his entire life, and suffered at least a dozen serious concussions from plane crashes and car accidents.
As you can probably guess, his financial situation was equally tumultuous. He was paid the modern-day equivalent of $55,000 for writing a 3,000-word piece for Collier’s magazine in 1944. He also sold tens of thousands of copies of his books during his lifetime.
But he was always teetering on the verge of insolvency. In “The Sun Also Rises,” one of the main characters, Mike Campbell, seemed to echo the author’s own sentiments when asked, “How did you go bankrupt?”
Mike responded, “Two ways — gradually, then suddenly.”
That’s a line I think about a whole lot when I’m talking to churches about the future of their local congregation and their larger denominational tradition. I cannot emphasize this point enough — we are in a lull right now. While most major denominations have been experiencing decline for a while, their ship has remained seaworthy.
Yeah, some water will lap over the sides every once in a while, but there are still enough buckets and enough laborers to toss it back into the ocean.
That won’t be the case in a very short time horizon, and I don’t think many people realize just how quickly the buckets and the workers are going to disappear.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.