In the movie Fight Club, Brad Pitt’s character Tyler Durden says something that adequately conveys the sense of life that The Human Condition was created to meet.

This is what he says about today’s world:

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

It’s a fact. We are, in a sense, the “middle-children” of history: philosophers tell us that we are a society in transition, coming from, but not entirely out of, modern (and even pre-modern) notions and worldviews, and moving into postmodern ones. We see in one generation technological shifts and innovations that those who came before us would never dream of seeing in their lifetime. Ideas of every kind are available at such a steady stream, and are no longer validated by any kind of “authority.” The world is now an open-access society. One person’s word is as good as the other. Supporting evidence can be had for any position, however invalid, and contrary “evidence” can be hoisted for any other position, however ludicrous.

A global awareness is exposing us all to a wide array of different cultures and ways of seeing things, many of which claim to be the only exclusively right way.  And other cultures are springing up, saying that all ways are equally worthy, equally worth our time and appreciation.

We are a spiritually schizophrenic society.

And where does the message of Jesus Christ fit into all this?  Where do the followers of Jesus come into play in today’s world?  How do we bring his message to today’s world?  What does the gospel have to offer in the face of this multicultural onslaught?

And what is the gospel, anyway? What sort of radical life is Jesus calling us to?

The world is dying, literally dying, to hear the gospel.

We just need to make sure we’re getting the message across.

What can we, as Christ followers, offer a dying world, enslaved to consumerism and self-worship?

The Human Condition hopes to find that out, at least for our immediate social and community spheres that we happen to touch in our every day lives.

And we hope you join us in this exploration.

It will be an exploration of what it means to be a follower of Jesus in today’s world; what it means to be a part of this society, to share in the condition we’re all a part of. We’ll approach this journey as followers of Jesus.

There are Christians out there who feel that they can’t identify with the extreme fundamentalists. There are other Christians who can’t tolerate the “emerging” flavors of the faith. I want to reach out to Christians in doubt, Christians in exile, and Christians who are close to thinking that there is no reconciling Jesus with today’s world.

I want them to know one thing:

The message of Jesus will always be relevant to our human condition.