"For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs's gospel may seem like all the good news we need."

"But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results."

From "Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet," by Andy Crouch in the Wall Street Journal.

[T]he genius of Steve Jobs was to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort [death is "life's change agent"] is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of "the Apple faithful" and the "cult of the Mac" is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

Speaking of "hope"... wait... that's a topic shift I'll make into a separate post.