Talkin about your generation?

As the upheaval of cultural change sweeps through the American church, one of the groups most affected, and most on the forefront of change, is the so-called "Millennial Generation."
Also known as Generation Y, this cohort of younger people is posing significant challenges to the faith practices, if not the theological foundations, of older generations.
Few are better positioned to have their finger on the pulse of this questing group of young people than the president of Eastern University, David Black.
Its main campus situated in the suburban greenery of St. Davids, the 4,000-student undergraduate and graduate school also has satellite colleges and centers in urban Philadelphia, West Virginia and in various countries around the world. Affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA since its founding, the university has a tradition of teaching rooted in faith, reason and justice.
What characterizes this new generation?
Bright, but probably not as well-read as previous generations, and living in a time dominated by technology, millenials are more introspective and reflective, not willing to embrace uncritically what they have been taught about God and what it means to know and follow God, Black said.
"What they see in those of us who most readily identify as Christian appears to them to be the most readily mean-spirited," Black said.
From the perspective of some younger Christians, "we reduce something as profound as the love of God to something that is more political and cultural than formational and spiritual."
Yet Black doesn't cast this generational divide in personal terms.
"I think most of us (older Christians) have tried to honorably and prayerfully live up to what we understand the Gospel to be. It's just a statement by them that what we have given them doesn't intersect with their own autobiographies, and that they are seeking for a new way to express what they believe."
Drawn to nondenominational churches and more liturgical settings (like Anglicanism), the evangelical millenials that Black shepherds find themselves at home in churches exploring new ways of worship and in settings that hearken back to some very old ones, he said.
As other commentators have noted, millenials do not seem to have the investment in the battles over human sexuality issues that have so preoccupied their elders.
"They aren't going to get exercised over these things" said Black, who characterized that generation as relational, nonjudgmental and able to find goodness in people they get to know personally.
In rejecting the strong connection between politics and Christianity often embraced by their elders, many (but not all) younger Christians also are rejecting, he said, a Christian viewpoint that "wraps itself in the American flag."
But that doesn't mean that this cohort is missing a social conscience. In fact, they are deeply concerned about global problems like the degradation of the environment, sexual trafficking and the plight of oppressed peoples, Black said.
In addition, his students find themselves disillusioned with a market-driven culture and question the integrity of a system in which there is such a gulf between the "haves" and the "have-nots," Black said.
At Eastern, faculty are addressing the concerns of millenials by teaching spiritual formation, justice and critical thinking — providing a safe place to ask questions, but being clear about what they believe, he commented.
Given the environmental, spiritual and cultural difficulties that may confront young adults, is Black optimistic?
"I believe that this generation is preparing itself psychologically and culturally to live with less than their parent's generation. It's going to be more difficult. They have to be more creative, more courageous and less materialistic."
Black, known as a sometimes bold innovator himself, believes that God is faithfully preparing his young students for what lies ahead of them.
"What I celebrate is that, rather than rejecting the church in a difficult time, they are deepening their search for the things of God in the penumbral (partially shadowed) regions of the church.
(I should disclose that a few years back I worked for Palmer Theological Seminary, an Eastern University graduate school.)

After the storm

I don't know that anyone expected the violence.



Last Thursday, I had just said goodbye to a younger friend when the skies began to darken.



Oh, a thunderstorm, I thought -- forgetting, of course, to check to see if we had left any windows open.



Then the winds began -- shaking the trees, sending plant containers across our grass, and leaves dancing through the windy air onto the lawn.



I called my ex husband, hoping to establish some kind of human contact. After leaving a message, I got ahold of the grandmother of neighbors, staying at their home while they were on a cruise.



But it wasn't until I got outside and saw that a tree had come down in the back that I realized the tempest might have been more than a bad thunderstorm. And it was only after that, driving around a town where poles and wires swayed tipsily across lanes, that I realized this was more than your average storm.

Some of my neighbors have generators -- it is perhaps a mark of my citified mindset that I don't have one -- yet. Nor do I have a chainsaw.

Imagine me with a chainsaw? Right.


There was mildly wry excitement in the fact that we made the newspapers, little Glenmoore being a storm epicenter. Talk of 90 mile an hour winds is thin gruel when you can't flush a toilet or water your crops.

It took us till Sunday to get our power back. Some neighborhoods here still don't have it. And they predict storms this afternoon -- better get out and mown the leave strewn lawn.

Parry...and thrust

Recently, as have many of us, I've been forced to grapple with the question: why, exactly, are we in Afghanistan?

Oh yes, of course...to fight the Taliban and go after Al Quaeda.

After thousands of Afghan civilians have died, and the toll on our own soldiers increases almost each day, it seems fair to ask: are we accomplishing our mission?

And beyond that -- do Americans really support this war?

My mind went back to quite a different war a few days ago -- one which must have appeared also as if it would go on until every young man was killed.

It had taken me almost a year to look for the weapon we had packed last August when we moved furniture out of my dad's home for the last time.

As I noted here last year, we had no idea why dad had a bayonet. Stuck in the back of his office closet, it may have been left by a previous owner.

And if Mr. C hadn't pestered me to look for it, I would have been happy to wait another six months or so to unpack it.

After all, my sister wanted to destroy it. But I argued that we should keep it, that its historic value trumped the fact that it was constructed only to butcher.

She and her boyfriend had wrapped it in so much cloth that it took quite a while to unwrap it and see the blade shining through the leather.

Personally, I didn't think it had lost it's power to terrorize. As we looked at the hilt, we could make out the date: 1861, the city: Hartford, Connecticut. We think that the manufacturer was one Collins & Co -- but an appraiser will have to let us know.

I have no desire to make money off the bayonet, but I do want to know some of the history around its manufacturing before we give it to a museum -- if they want it. We'll not know if it was passed on to someone by a father, or a grandfather or a widow who wanted their child to remember what it was like to fight and perhaps die for the cause of national unity.

Apparently bayonets rarely killed -- the guns got the enemy first.

The bayonet lies safe in a closet at the house of a friend -- awaiting that time when we will surrender this part of our history, and hand it over to become, much more appropriately, part fo the history of our nation.

Wikimedia Commons Picture

That's me in the corner....

When a guy checks you out online (and he's not a 74 year old named Fred) and he's good looking, even in a kind of scholarly way, well, it's my duty to return the favor. It's a pretty low-commitment way of revealing mild interest -- and opens the door to a potential conversation.

So today I did. I liked his profile -- he seemed smart, well-informed, had a sensitive side, and didn't appear to take himself too seriously.

I wrote him, commenting on something he had said in his profile (why has subtle flirting gone the way of Regency romance?). He wrote me back.

And then it came up, as it often does with intelligent men. That religion thang.

I looked at your profile, he told me, and I thought you were cute (he might be the first guy who ever called this Amazon cute) -- but you seemed a little too religious for me. Your subsequent emails seemed to contradict this impression, so perhaps we can continue to talk. Tell me one thing I haven't learned from your profile.

Of course, I told him about the bondage parties. (Not my bondage parties, silly). And the threesomes (yours, not mine). And my alternative lifestyle friend, of whom I still am fond.


But I couldn't help sighing. Again, someone who probably considers himself enlightened dismisses (or is tempted to dismiss) a woman who is upfront about the fact that she, indeed, believes something.

I have a feeling this wouldn't be a sticking point in California, where Christianity competes with New Age philosophies and Eastern religions. Or in the South, which is still a stronghold of conservative Christianity.

I'm not a big fan of Christians who moan about being persecuted here in the United
States. And I understand that the association of evangelical Christianity with politics under George Bush probably made a lot of liberal people angry.

It just made me recall, as though I need to, that anti-religious prejudice is alive and well among the intelligentsia.

I keep hoping that I'll meet a guy who is open enough to believe that you can have faith and think for yourself.

But apparently in liberal America, as we can see in churches that continually attempt to make faith palatable by making it reasonable, you can only have one at a time.

My writing pal hasn't given up on me, though. And I haven't thrown him to the wolves, either.

But I've already used my best bondage story. Anybody willing to loan me another?

This is your mind. This is your mind online...

Do you ever worry that perhaps your child is being rewired by all the time he or she spends glued to the computer, on the cell, or playing games on their Ipod?

Do you ever stop, in between texting and reading and talking, to think about the effect all of this stimuli could be having on you?

Well, pop on over to Philly Moms and state your case, whatever that might be, on the heated debate over whether electronica can indeed reshape the neurons in our brains.

Don't get distracted and forget now!

Forgiveness in E Flat

I've had occasion this week to ponder what it means to forgive.

Not I've suffered terribly -- one wasted evening does not a drama make. Just a few blog posts.

And perhaps I'm a bit less willing to reach out, a bit more suspicious with other guys for now -- expecting that they will turn on me. So the hurt is real. But to be fair, I can't lay the weight of that disillusionment on one man.

Yet it makes sense to move on -- wish the guy well and hope that we both learned something. I think I was saved some pain.

But what of the boys who left my son in tears tonight at the Little League playoffs, blaming him for missing some catches in the outfield in a game marred with poor pitching, errors, and some really juvenile fielding?

That's going to take a little longer.

I know people who thrive on a sense that they have been wronged. Endless slights...daggers between the shoulders, and a world bent on hurting them.

They can make lists, itemize, ritualize...and make life hellish for friend and bystander.

We forgive, in part, so we can move onwards.

Free ourselves by letting go of our anger against the other who has wronged us.

Start afresh.

We forgive, it seems to me, to unchain us to show compassion, and concern, and even love, with a deeper freedom.

A freedom which perhaps we all crave, whether we confess it, or no. Yearn for that inner unleashing, but still sometimes choose to wear the manacles around our hands, our feet, our souls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Casu1yaobY

Have you had to practice forgiveness recently?

How deep was the wound?

Do you truly feel like you have put the injury behind you?

When you stand...and when you fold

What causes you to feel shame?

Or, to put it more directly, is it ever appropriate to feel shame -- as opposed to remorse?

I don't feel shame a lot anymore. But when I do, I recognize the historic roots of that shame.

I have paid a price for walking a different road than many of those with whom I would ordinarily find commonality. I wear the mantle of the outsider, as a convert, a liturgical bridgebuilder, a journalist.

And in this I'm not that different from immigrants, and those who transition from one economic class to another, or folks who, for one reason or another, have been compelled to step outside the bounds of the conventions that generally make it easier for us to move in and out of friendships and romances.

For some reason, even when I was younger, my insecurity would focus on my looks -- the guys at PTS who only wanted to date blonds, the fellow Anglican who told me he liked "All American girls." And it's true, that in a seminary full of WASP Presbyterians, I stood out.

Call me a late bloomer, but in my thirties, I began to appreciate that it was OK to look a wee bit, well, exotic.

Thank goodness for the assurance that is one of the better things about getting older.

But, as we all know, it's what inside that counts -- counts more and more as we age.

And on that score, I have a feeling that perhaps a little more remorse might be in order.

When I shoot from the lip. When I lapse into my drama queen routine. When I don't see the consequences...

Remorse can prompt change. As a friend reminded me yesterday, with a bracing "Are you kidding?" shame can mess with your mind. It is a dead end street, a boulevard of broken dreams.

But remorse...the ability to feel what someone else felt, to walk with them a few steps, to see that inadvertantly or not you have damaged him or her...well, that may be the beginning of healing -- for both parties. For a community. Even for our despoiled earth.


Can you tell the difference?