> Bill Peirson Case #73 - Disconnected

Editorial: Disconnected

August 06, 2025

William L. Peirson

Lego bricks were never designed to exist in isolation.

Caleb Campion (former College Assistant Dean and LEGO Master) built this model of new students and their parents being welcomed for O’Week at New College. His beautiful work highlights the importance of connection. Each and every year freshers of different size, shape and colour connect with one other and with the oldies returning from the previous year to create a brand new New College community.

Just like the little plastic bricks, we—people—are meant to be connected to one another. Unlike plastic bricks, though, we suffer when we remain disconnected for too long.

Cracks can be seen everywhere we look in our increasingly fragmented society. Young people are particularly at risk, spending less time with friends, having fewer romantic relationships, and more mental health problems than any previous generation. In our lead article, Patrick Parkinson unpacks why this is the case and what young people can do about it.

Clinical psychologist Leisa Aitken looks at a different problem of disconnection—the importance of seeing ourselves as embedded in ‘something bigger’, to make sense of life. This is not obvious; freedom from connections that bind us has its appeal. A single Lego brick has endless potential: it might end up in a model house, truck, Opera House, Deathstar or even New College! Once a brick is built into a structure it has less freedom, but it has a meaning and belonging that it lacked in isolation.

The severing of culture from its Christian roots is yet another form of disconnection the West is facing. Scholars and public intellectuals are sounding warnings about what this could mean for Western society, and there have been a spate of high-profile conversions to Christianity as a result. Our final feature article has philosopher Emma Wood asking whether these ‘political’ conversions are genuine or merely a means to a sociopolitical end.

My minister, Tim Blencowe, recently pointed out that our self-destructive tendency to disconnection can be found right back in the remarkably economical first chapters of the Bible. Genesis 1 and 2 paint a picture of a creation rich in connected differentness—people with God, and with the rest of creation; Adam with Eve, and the promise of many and varied further human relationships (as discussed herein by Dani Treweek). But instead of cherishing their God-given roles and relationships, Adam and Eve decided to go it alone. The immediate result of this initial rebellion was further distance: they ‘hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden’ (Genesis 3:8). Separated from their creator, the fracture line spreads rapidly. The next chapter sees the first brothers, Cain and Abel, torn apart by jealousy and murder—an extreme, deliberate and violent disconnecting of relationship. Cain tries to hide his crime, but by the end of the chapter his descendant, Lamech, is boasting about committing multiple unjustified murders.

The many forms of disconnection discussed in the pages of this edition are evidence of the ongoing rift between God and humanity, and how it corrupts all areas of life. Thankfully it is not the final word: reconnection is freely offered to all through the death and resurrection of Jesus (John 10:14-18).