Category: Youth Ministry
A Site I Read Weekly
There are websites, news, opinion, resource and entertainment, that I read each week. A new addition to my reading is a site called, Religion Dispatches. I am always on the look out for sites that treat religion and culture with intellectual curiosity and critical reflection. If there was ever a time when we need the “familiar” to challenge rather than comfort, now is the time. I think it is the “familiar” that has the best potential to alter, change (shame) or help our nation evolve during this second decade of the 21st century. Maybe the “anger” directed at Islam is a marker of our national movement through the grief process. I am trusting, as I suspect many Americans are, that acceptance is not far off.
For those of us that serve with youth and young adults, this “opinion” piece is a directional beacon. Plus, I grew up in the 1970’s and 1980’s so headlines like the one below catch my eye.
1977 Redux: Star Wars and Evangelical Revisionists History
by Matthew Avery Hutton | Religion Dispatches Opinion | August 31, 2010So what do Peter Marshall and Star Wars have in common? A lot. Most importantly, they show us that Americans are still searching for and finding faiths that affirm who they imagine themselves to be as a people rather than religions that challenge them to be better than they are. Marshall tells Christians that they are linked to a long line of holy predecessors just like them. Star Wars, in turn, helps viewers recognize their connection to an all-powerful, all-encompassing Force.
Both Star Wars and The Light and the Glory also trade in Americans’ nostalgia. Star Wars evokes a time when the most technologically “advanced” movie ever made had little more than cartoonish violence and no sex or profanity. There were no Bachelors, Survivors, Big Brothers, or Biggest Losers in 1977; and there were no films shot with digital cameras or programs broadcast in HD. Yet Star Wars was and still is unbelievably cool.
Peter Marshall also trades in nostalgia. Nostalgia for a particular vision of a white, middle-class, pre-Civil Rights, pre-Vietnam, pre-Watergate past. An imagined day when men were men, women were women, African Americans knew their place, and Mexicans lived south of the border. Not so cool.
When Do You Become An Adult?
For those that work and serve in “young adult ministry” in our denomination (or any for that matter) this article in The New York Times is interesting reading, What Is It About 20-Somethings? I’ve often hear “20 Somethings” troubled with being labeled “young adults” and understand the issues with this distinction. I was not fond of that label either. Society considers a person an adult when you turn 18, you can be drafted into military service and vote at age 18, but a person cannot purchase booze or rent a car. We are a society of mixed messages for this age group that are enabled or discouraged by parents, professors, institutions, business, economic status, and religious practice.
If, as this researcher concluded, your 20’s is an extended adolescence what does that mean for our culture, for leadership, and family structures? Does this extended adolescence only matter to those with financial resources or families willing to provide the funding for “20 somethings” to find themselves? What will this mean for seminaries that are educating persons for ministry?
What Is It About 20-Somethings?
by Robin Marantz Hening | The New York Times | August 18, 2010Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?
This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents — “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner, as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?
It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.