I really love this essay by Andy Crouch about the hope that Steve Jobs brings to the world. Jobs, you may know, recently took a medical leave of absence for an indefinite period of time. Crouch speculates on what the world would be like if he never returned:
Steve Jobs’s medical leave of absence is the top story in today’s newspapers. The Wall Street Journal says his brief and poignant memo raises “uncertainty over his health and the future of the world’s most valuable technology company.” These two questions—Jobs’s health and Apple’s health—are the focus of almost all the coverage today. But I’m interested in the health of our culture, and what will happen to it when (not if) Steve Jobs departs the stage for the last time.
As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress.