God and invisibility

Of all of God's attributes, His "invisibility" should be seldom mentioned if ever. Christians act in faith of a God who is real. They trust that the good God is neither passive nor silent, and they pray accordingly. To say that God is invisible is to focus on the ways in which He seems...well, unreal: unseen by eyes, unheard by ears, unfelt by fingers. This focus on lack of evidence can't be beneficial or encouraging, especially for believers who have difficulty maintaining consistent confidence in Him.

God may be "invisible", but Christians see Him through His actions and His promises. Why should they proclaim the fact that He doesn't project His form physically for gawkers?

what "bromance" signifies about culture

Undeniably, language changes, and as it does it exposes the intangible trends and forces that shape culture. Specifically, the onset of the lighthearted word "bromance" (I apologize upfront for any misunderstandings or misinterpretations about the word's meaning) is symptomatic of ongoing shifts in attitudes about a range of topics:

• community. The first cultural clue of any word is that it exists at all, implying that the word 1) serves a distinct purpose and/or expresses a unique concept, 2) differs from other words and concepts sufficiently to facilitate clear usage. In the case of "bromance", the caring and mutually beneficial male relationship it denotes must be significantly peculiar to people for them to need or appreciate the word. Thus, the notion of a normal human community, or at least one composed of men, doesn't include the support, loyalty, and commitment defined by "bromance". For years, sociological observers have commented on the progressively isolated and impersonal nature of cultures such as the USA's. In a different culture with a stronger sense of community, bromances would be too common to merit a specific label, due to a communal expectation of relational closeness.
  
• homosexuality. Having just linked characteristics of bromance to community, let me hasten to emphasize that my impression of "bromance" does not include homosexual desire. If it did, then people wouldn't be applying it exclusively to heterosexuals. Nevertheless, the formation of the word, clearly a portmanteau of "bro" and "romance", reveals the droll intention behind it; it's designed to indicate a blurring of the distinction between male friendship ("bros") and passionate desire for someone ("romance"), as in "those two heterosexual men have a curiously...intense relationship, i.e., bromance". The mere possibility of this wordplay could be related to several trends: 1) greater awareness of homosexuality (actual romance between men), else people wouldn't think to compare it to other kinds of male relationships, which are much more prevalent; 2) greater acceptance of homosexuality, else people would be hesitant to use jokey words like "bromance" that hint at it in mainstream media; 3) greater identification with homosexuality, else there could be none of the supposed emotional "confusion" or "middle ground" that the word conveys (if heterosexuals and homosexuals were viewed as fundamentally dissimilar then someone couldn't be between the two states).
  
• love. The essential assumption behind bromance is that differences in love are differences in degree rather than in kind. The trend is to increasingly view love as a continuum, with romance toward one end, the friendship of "bros" some distance away in the other direction, and bromance presumably in-between. This perspective perhaps makes sense when one presumes that love is equivalent to overall attraction and overall attraction is inextricably tied to sex. In other words, someone stipulates that love is no more and no less than the battle of basic drives answering basic questions (in an encounter, should I fight or flee or submit or dominate or cooperate or procreate or nurture?). But the complexity of how people feel, think, and act discredits a simplistic one-dimensional scale of love. Frankly, people can appreciate and help and communicate with others without there being a shadowy undercurrent of desire for the recipient. Even people performing purely secular charity work wouldn't argue that they're so motivated. Indeed, part of what distinguishes virtuous charity from other giving is that its targets are often unlovely. Moreover, one kind of love is the ability to appreciate something just for the sake of acknowledging its excellence (and here, I'm borrowing from C.S. Lewis still more than usual, this time The Four Loves). Men can appreciate each other's strengths and weaknesses without there being "more to it" than that. And this should be obvious, but not all physical contact, whether a handshake or the dreaded full-body hug, is necessarily sexual, no matter how obscurely considered (when a reader thinks that David and Jonathon were lovers because they were close, that reflects more on the reader's frame of mind than theirs). As a word that typifies a regrettable trend of losing the intricate disparities of love within human relationships, particularly men's, the humorous word "bromance" is weightier than it seems.