Leadingchurch.com

Washington Post

Today, a book deal like this isn’t considered a risk. “Quarter Life Poetry” falls perfectly in line with a booming genre: the woe-is-us millennial struggle book. The publishing industry is awash in memoirs and comedy musings from 20-somethings, most of whom were discovered on blogs and social media.

Millennials, Siegel said, grew up with economic security and the notion that they could be anything they wanted, only to find themselves graduating from college into a world that hadn’t recovered from the Great Recession. Poems like hers, and the slew of other books about the struggles of being her age, aim to be painfully honest about the difficulties.

The exception might be “Not That Kind of Girl,” the book millennial icon Lena Dunham published at age 28. But Dunham was already nearly a household name from her HBO show “Girls.”

The popularity of the sitcom’s messy and self-confessional nature certainly paved the way for interest in books such as “Quarter Life Poetry.” Still, being dismayed in your 20s is not actually a new phenomenon. Before Dunham, there was Emily Gould, the Internet’s first queen of oversharing, who blended heavy doses of self-analysis into her takedowns of the New York elite for Gawker and landed a book deal; so did Joyce Maynard way back in 1972, after she spilled her jaded take on growing up in the 1960s for the New York Times. Most notably, perhaps, was Elizabeth Wurtzel, who published her memoir “Prozac Nation” in 1994, when she was just 26.

“When I wanted to write ‘Prozac Nation,’ they thought it should be a novel because no one in their 20s wrote a memoir,” Wurtzel said. “You can’t imagine, it was a whole different world. Nobody thought it was a good idea.”

Quarter Life Poetry

The Average 29 year old: living with a partner in the suburbs without a bachelor’s degree

Instead, the average 29-year-old did not graduate from a four-year university, but she did start college; held several jobs, including more than two in the last three years; is not as likely to be married as her parents at this age, but is still likely to be living with somebody; is less likely to own a home than 15 years ago, but despite the story of urban renewal, is more likely to live outside of a dense urban area like Brooklyn or Washington, D.C.

Jesus Creed Mall Christians

And so Smith argues, that our churches have to be places that re-story us, and that to do that they ought to use (innovatively) the resources of ancient Christian practices, like sacraments and confession or reciting the creeds.

He even goes so far to say, that if your church doesn’t help re-story you with some kind of sacramental/ancient-future liturgy then you ought to look for another church that does.

To be fair here, he has a generous view of what those types of churches can look like, but he believes that this is so important to Christian formation that if it is not happening at the church where you are, you need to go somewhere else.

His argument for everything, from how we do youth ministry (entertainment based) to how we think of evangelism (consumeristic), has centered around this idea that has been counter-intuitive for the past hundred years. It is the idea that it is the oddity of ancient Christian practices that can actually help form us, and attract unchurched people.

Holy Ghost Conga Lines

John Gray

For those baffled by ISIS, however, it cannot be only ISIS that is mysterious. So too must be much of modern history. ISIS has brought with it many atrocious assaults on civilized values: the sexual enslavement of women and children; the murder of gay men; the targeted killing of writers, cartoonists, and Jews; indiscriminate slaughter at a rock concert; and what amounted to the attempted genocide of the Yezidi. All of these acts of barbarism have modern precedents, many of them in the past century. The use of sexual violence as a military strategy featured in ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the 1990s; during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971; in Nepal, Colombia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and many other conflict zones. The destruction of buildings and artworks, which ISIS has perpetrated at the ancient site of Palmyra among other places, has several twentieth-century precedents. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks razed churches and synagogues in Russia. Mao Zedong demolished large parts of China’s architectural inheritance and most of Tibet’s, while the Pol Pot regime wrecked pagodas and temples and aimed to destroy the country’s cities. In these secular acts of iconoclasm, the goal was to abolish the past and create a new society from “year zero”—an idea that goes back to “year one” of the calendar introduced in France in 1793 to signal the new era inaugurated by the French Revolution. Systematically destroying not only pre-Islamic relics but also long-established Islamic sites, the aim of ISIS is not essentially different.

Fundamentalism looks to the lost purity of an imaginary past; but in that they thrive in societies whose traditions are in disarray because of an encounter with new technologies and economic forces, fundamentalist movements are themselves essentially modern.

As Norman Cohn argued in his seminal study The Pursuit of the Millennium, twentieth-century totalitarian movements were fueled by secular versions of end-time myths. Cohn applied his analysis chiefly to Communism and Nazism, but later events suggest it can be applied more widely. From American flying-saucer cults to the bioterrorist Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, there have been many examples of movements that have reframed apocalyptic beliefs in ersatz-scientific terms. Though its eschatological beliefs are explicitly religious, ISIS is the latest example of a recurring modern phenomenon.

Ht. Dreher

Dreher

amazon “Transparent” crew upset by unisex bathrooms

HT: David Brooks

The New Yorker

Wonkblog

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/dinosaurs-werent-wiped-out-by-that-meteorite-after-all/