Young adults 21 and over are invited to join the St. Al’s Youth Ministry and the Diocese of Trenton’s Department of Youth and Young Adult Ministry on Aug. 26 for a summer Theology on Tap event.
Hosted at the Columbian Club, 401 Bartley Rd., Jackson, the evening will begin at 7 p.m. and feature Father Michael Kennedy, pastor of St. Luke Parish, Toms River, who will speak on the theme “The world is not what we think.”
The theme, Father Kennedy said, came from two books he was reading which explored the idea that the world has lost its sense of the divine.
“The basic premise is that one thing we have lost because of the modernist separation of the spiritual and the material is that the spiritual is constantly around us,” he said. “The world is ‘shot through’ with God’s grandeur, it has his fingerprints on it; we’ve lost a sense of God’s presence around us.”
Predating the pandemic but nevertheless accentuated by it, he noted, is a sense of malaise and disenchantment with the world.
“I don’t think we’ve come out of it yet,” Father Kennedy said. “Statistically the amount of mental illness and decline among Gen Z-ers … [we have] the most medicated generation of all time.”
He pointed to the ubiquitous prevalence of technology, particularly cell phones and the way we access the internet on them, as having an effect on everyone by decreasing the experience of enchantment.
“People are reaching toward something that has more wonder and is beyond our ability to dissect,” Father Kennedy said, pointing out that an undercurrent of interest in the traditional and the connection between the natural and the supernatural has young people exploring more ancient forms of worship – either in the Church, or even Orthodox traditions.
“Pope Leo XIV has really hinted at AI being a threat to the sense of enchantment,” he continued. Additonally, “Scientism – the idea that all knowledge is reducible to science – doesn’t work. People are looking elsewhere.”
Enchantment is something that needs to be rediscovered, he said. “In Scripture enchantment was a communal thing … [We want people to] recapture the wonder of Christianity.”
Father Kennedy hopes that the Theology on Tap presentation, which may be the springboard for future discussions, will be an invitation to go deeper.
“People respond to invitation,” he said. “The idea is not so much an exhaustive discussion, but to get us to lean into more understanding … This is hopefully sending us out on mission to rediscover the Church’s enchantment.”
For more information and upcoming registration, and to be added to the TOT mailing list, visit https://dioceseoftrenton.org/theology-on-tap.