Now, 15 percent of Americans polled claim no religious preference, twice the number who declared themselves uninterested in God in 1990. The share of Americans who think religion “can answer all or most of today’s problems” is 48 percent—a big number, sure, but a historic low.

When Amy and I were very young, the common childhood complaint that x was not fair, while never explicitly outlawed in our house, was well understood to be fruitless. “Life’s not fair!” was always the response. We knew the story of Job and understood the moral to be the same: You believe your situation ought to improve, but God may have other ideas. To dwell on plans of your own devising was sinful.

So because my father cannot protest that the systemic devaluation of all he holds dear feels unfair to him, he watches Fox News, which says it for him. Just 60 percent of Americans identify as religious, last he heard, while the ranks of atheists swell.

My mother is quieter on the subject, as usual. When the chardonnay and mugs of foamy beer are placed in front of us she looks around the room and smiles. Her eyes rest on the spoils of our drifting afternoon—paper shopping bags and $10 probably-not-pashminas bought from a street vendor. Coats are draped over seat backs and we are careful not to kick up too much of the sawdust that blankets the floor.

“Oh, it’s so nice to sit down,” she says. We are careful not to talk about Amy.

“Remember when we saw Rudy Giuliani at the Columbus Day parade? That was fun.”

Both my parents shook his hand; my mother snapped a photo. We also know we cannot discuss politics or religion, so conversation pivots to subjects that do not expose how different we’ve become. Technology is one such subject; none of us likes it much. My father is intensely suspicious of social media. He is also suspicious of people who get paid to tell other people how much everyone ought to be enjoying these new gadgets and how effective they make you and your photogenic family.

“You know most people think technology is neutral,” he says. “Morally neutral. They think that the means don’t affect us. That the technology is just at our disposal, doing what we want it to do but nothing more. But technology always bends toward the dark side.”

I had heard him say this before. It was another favorite theme. By “always” he meant always and by “dark side” he meant that any new technological whizbang would eventually be used to hurt people, whether it be TNT or the efficient delivery of asphyxiate gas to shower stalls. That the harm in some cases was self-inflicted, of the type-A-who-can’t-put-down-his-BlackBerry kind, didn’t matter to him. His thinking on this front was heavily influenced by Jacques Ellul, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Bordeaux and a French Reformed lay minister who wrote some thirty books on Protestant theological themes. My father had read Ellul’s "The Technological Society" at the recommendation of an old mentor, and Ellul’s general idea that technology took on a life of its own, essentially training users to adapt to it rather than the other way around, had taken firm root in my father’s mind around the same time he began questioning what he was really doing with his life, which if we as a family had to pull out a calendar and point to exact dates, would all select 1987, our widely acknowledged Most Crappy Year.

Ellul was also highly suspicious of our culture’s tendency to celebrate efficiency, and this, too, my father appreciated. Wishing someone Happy Birthday! on Facebook, for instance. Why in the world would anyone do that? my father wanted to know. Maybe wishing someone a Happy Birthday shouldn’t be so simple. Perhaps some tasks shouldn’t be relatively effortless, maybe true gifts involved sacrifice, and perhaps we shouldn’t assume we’d won some victory over time whenever we accomplished something faster. Left unchecked, social media would land us in a Tower of Babel moment. We’d all be blue in the face from talking, pinging, communicating all the time, and we’d lose the ability to say the unsayable.