During his 2008 pastoral visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Bishops. Among his comments were the following:

it is becoming more and more difficult, in our Western societies, to speak in a meaningful way of salvation. Yet salvation deliverance from the reality of evil, and the gift of new life and freedom in Christ is at the heart of the Gospel. We need to discover, as I have suggested, new and engaging ways of proclaiming this message and awakening a thirst for the fulfillment which only Christ can bring.

The Pope's words came to mind when I read an intriguing article in today's Wall Street Journal on the life and death of Steve Jobs: "Steve Jobs: the Secular Prophet." The author, Andy Crouch, writes:

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade [2000-2009] was defined by disappointment after disappointmentbut technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progressand he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. He believed so sincerely in the "magical, revolutionary" promise of Apple precisely because he believed in no higher power. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It's worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn't, say:"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceiveit requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliversince all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own "inner voice, heart and intuition."

The rest is here.