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Perhaps the most important difference between memory and nostalgia is that nostalgia wants not only to honor the past, but to return to it. Nostalgia can turn faithful memory into false memory, so that people are stuck in the past.
In a July 2026, 1989, interview with U.S. News & World Report, theologian Jaroslav Pelikan alluded to this kind of modern-day nostalgia among Christians. “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supports that nothing should ever be done for the first time…”
But what does the role of tradition look like? Maybe a little like a tree. When we are rooted in the past, rather than trapped by it, we can grow upward, outward and onward. We can remember the whole story of who we were and who we are in ways that also free us, by God’s grace, to grow toward what we can be.
This message is excerpted from the Bible study “Holy time” (Session one) by Meghan Johnston Aelabouni in the September 2020 Gather magazine. Today we commemorate Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, martyr, c. 258.