by David G. Bonagura, Jr.
What hysteria-creating, Wall Street-swirling, media-obsessing New Thing awaits us in 2026? It was COVID in 2020, ChatGPT in 2022, Generative AI in 2023, DOGE in 2025. The next New Thing is anyone's guess, but if it is like its predecessors, it will consume our attention and generate fresh anxieties over how it will upend our lives.
Today, we rarely perceive these Newfangled Things as trials sent by God to test our fidelity, and certainly not as chastisement for sin. The New Testament God, we are told, is too loving for that.
Such enlightened theories are at odds with St. Augustine, who argued vehemently in The City of God that God sends trials to the good and the evil alike, not because He is vengeful, but because He has ordained suffering as a means for spiritual growth. During the "universal catastrophe" that was the fall of the Roman Empire, Augustine asserted that "the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement, because they viewed them with the eyes of faith." (I.9)
As Newfangled Things became part of ordinary life, we learn that they are no different from Any Other Thing. What they do for us, and to us, depends on our attitudes toward them and how we use them. They may well be trials or chastisements – if not for our culture, then for some of us as individuals. Negative outcomes, alas, are likely: new things come to be in a world weakened by sin and are destined for human beings inclined toward selfishness. A New Thing promised to make our lives better, paradoxically and simultaneously can undermine them.
Augustine, advising citizens of the Heavenly City still here on earth how to navigate the world's most recent problems, did not appeal to technology or influencers. Rather, he offered eternal advice from the Bible, which contains the tools his contemporaries needed most. He listed them in Book XV.6:
1. "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." (Galatians 6:2)
2. "Admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that none of you repays evil for evil." (1 Thessalonians 5:14-15)
3. "If a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted." (Galatians 6:1)
4. "Do not let the sun go down on your anger." (Ephesians 4:26)
5. "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone." (Matthew 18:15)
6. "As for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear." (1 Timothy 5:20)

These Scripture verses command three types of action: self-regulation, moral correction of others, and forgiveness. Only the first, in the form of dieting or exercise, has hope of making a twenty-first-century New Year's resolution list. But the great Bishop of Hippo saw what we, consumed with the world, cannot: "So many precepts are given about mutual forgiveness and the great care needed for the maintenance of peace" because without them "no one will be able to see God."
To see God is the purpose of our existence. All other things, including the great goods of family, of religious life, of charity, are ordered to this. Self-regulation, moral correction, and forgiveness, writes Augustine, are "how the citizens of the City of God are restored to health while on pilgrimage on this earth, as they sigh for their Heavenly Country."
Newfangled Things tend to work in the opposite direction and therefore can be dangerous: their shiny allure draws us into them. In our desire for them, we look away from God and His Commandments. So went Adam and Eve before the Tree in Eden, so go we before the latest New Thing. In pulling us away from God, Newfangled Things do not generate peace, a fruit of the Spirit that allows us to see God. They create angst in the soul. When angst reigns, God feels absent, for the anxious, albeit unwittingly, have set themselves up in God's place.
How can we re...