Mucky Declarations

This will be one of two posts on this topic.  Originally, this was a post on a web forum, which was aimed more at the theological/ecclesiological facet of my generation.  I’ve recently seen something which makes me want to hit on the socioeconomic facet as well.  Consider this a primer.

I’m seeing a lot of talk lately about generations X, Y, and Z, all of which were recently lumped into a group called the ‘Millenials’ in a recent 60 Minutes story. A couple of years ago, they had a similar story on the so called ‘Echo Boomers,’ who are basically the children of the Baby Boomer generation.

Much of the talk has looked at the phychological outworkings of many of the new thinking of society, parents, and schools. There are a lot of interesting things.

John Piper’s Taste and See this week discusses another author who labels many of this generation, now becoming adults, graduating HS and college, and entering the work force, ‘adultolescents,’ much due to their increased focus on safety and security, often to the point of being coddled and incessantly praised, and their reliance on their parents to the point of absurdity.

Ultimately, Piper suggests 15 ways which the modern church should seek to respond to this generation:

How Should the Church Respond?
How might the church respond to this phenomenon in our culture? Here are my suggestions.

 

1. The church will encourage maturity, not the opposite. “Do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Corinthians 4:20).

 

2. The church will press the fact that maturity is not a function of being out of school but is possible to develop while in school.

 

3. While celebrating the call to life long singleness, the church will not encourage those who don’t have the cal to wait till late in their twenties or thirties to marry, even if it means marrying while in school.

 

4. The church will foster flexibility in life through living by faith and resist the notion that learning to be professionally flexible must happen through a decade of experimentation.

 

5. The church will help parents prepare their youth for independent financial living by age 22 or sooner, where disabilities do not prevent.

 

6. The church will provide a stability and steadiness in life for young adults who find a significant identity there.

 

7. The church will provide inspiring, worldview-forming teaching week in and week out that will deepen the mature mind.

 

8. The church will provide a web of serious, maturing relationships.

 

9. The church will be a corporate communion of believers with God in his word and his ordinances that provide a regular experience of universal significance.

 

10. The church will be a beacon of truth that helps young adults keep their bearings in the uncertainties of cultural fog and riptides.

 

11. The church will regularly sound the trumpet for young adults that Christ is Lord of their lives and that they are not dependent on mom and dad for ultimate guidance.

 

12. The church will provide leadership and service roles that call for the responsibility of maturity in the young adults who fill them.

 

13. The church will continually clarify and encourage a God-centered perspective on college and grad school and career development.

 

14. The church will lift up the incentives and values of chaste and holy singleness, as well as faithful and holy marriage.

 

15. The church will relentlessly extol the maturing and strengthening effects of the only infallible life charter for young adults, the Bible.

Theologically, I think that a lot of the stuff we’ve seen in the last decade or so regarding postmodernism, moral relativism, and the emerging church (not necessarily linking all of those three) has been due to this generation’s praise-heavy and no-wrong-answers attitude.

This is also a generation raised by daycare. Both parents working is the norm, which leaves children, at an early age, starved for affection, and needing to be constantly entertained and spoonfed, as well as developing relationships that are shallow and unmeaningful. But at the same time, we are trained by the internet to have huge amounts of interaction with complete strangers. It’s like we’ve traded quality for quantity.

Thoughts?

March 9th, 2010 | Tags: Christian Culture, John Piper, Millenials, Postmodernism | Category: Musings, Theological | Leave a comment

Lifehouse has been one of those bands who puts out consistently listenable music since breaking on the scene in the early 2000s with Hanging by a Moment. They’ve had a handful of radio hits since then, but nothing of their original caliber. However, the quality of their sound has stayed consistent over the years through the efforts of frontman Jason Wade, despite a varying supporting cast. Look for their Smoke and Mirrors out this next week.

If you’re looking for more throwback CCM, the old grunge-rock band Grammatrain has since resurrected with their original members more than ten years after their farewell show. They are actively recording, and have already released an EP to whet our appetites for the full-length. Look for this by mid-2010.

Number One Gun has been a staple of Tooth and Nail’s emo-punk scene since 2005. After a couple of defections and reincarnations, frontman Jeff Schneeweis has retaken the mantle of the band as a solo project. To The Secrets and Knowledge is a one-man show and continues the basic sound of the band, while stretching horizons of production, scope, and tone. This released in January, 2010 Also check out the split-off band, Surrogate, which has a couple albums out.

On the indie-pop scene, try imagining Owl City with a heavy banjo-coustic flare, and you’ve got Freelance Whales’ release, Weathervanes. Out of NYC, this quirky and singable band looks to be in the right place at the right time to tap into the widespread anti-top-ten crowd.

Finally, as I’ve previously posted, Blindside is also supposed to be releasing a new album after a five year drought. No new info yet.

February 27th, 2010 | Tags: Freelance Whales, Grammatrain, Lifehouse, Number One Gun, Tooth and Nail | Category: Music and Lyrics | Leave a comment

Some graphic artist at exergian evidently has too much time on his hands (scroll down a ways to see the whole series - watch out for some of the other art).

Here are a few of my favorites:

From: Boingboing

February 21st, 2010 | Tags: Humor, TV | Category: Random | Leave a comment

I’ve got two back-posts after this one that I want to publish. One’s on my half-marathon, and one is on Haiti. So fair warning - I’m usually late to process current events (even in my own life).

In the meantime, here’s some stuff that caught my eye over the past few days.

PETA, in their latest attempt to keep up with modern events AND modern technology, has suggested that Punxsutawney Phil (let’s see that at the national spelling bee) be replaced with a robot groundhog.

Lending more proof to the fact that Big Media does indeed control the narrative, almost nobody reported on the fact that Obama recently admitted (at a republican retreat, no less) that the health care legislation he helped nurse through Washington would, in fact, have broken his eternally repeated promise on the campaign trail that anyone who would like to keep their insurance, will be allowed to. One - how is this not news? Two - how can we believe anything this man tells us anymore?

Every third news story I’m seeing these days has something to do with a new phone, Apple’s new douche-top, or how Google now hates Amazon because they stole their lunch money, or something. I’m just ready for all of these devices to coalesce into a handy, portable, super-machine. It’s coming, and with all the noise lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens soon.

The Colts are in the Superbowl. One thing that I have loved about the Colts is their ability to shut up and get things done. I fell in love with the fact that Harrison always simply walked over to the official and handed him the ball, rather than act like an idiot like most other primma donna receivers. Saints fans, yap it up now. Have your fun. In the meantime, I’ll be quietly rooting for a repeat of an old Colts-Saints game.

February 2nd, 2010 | Tags: Apple Hate, Colts, Obama | Category: News of the Day | Leave a comment

I’ll have more time to post after this weekend. Until then, I’ll drop some knowledge on you.

January 15th, 2010 | Tags: cats, Humor | Category: Random | Leave a comment

What if cars are blood cells,
With the red cells on the right
And the white ones trav’ling back to home,
There on the left at night.

The highways veins and arteries
We kindly pump along
Next all our fellow hemo-nodes,
A bustling happy throng

The ten car pile-up is a clot
With pressure built behind
The few cells squeaking through the gap,
Joyous at their find.

With road construction surgery,
We yell and fuss and clot,
But mind the orange barrels, we
Despite our tempers hot.

When blood cells die, they’re traded in
For newer, faster wheels.
With little blood-cell salesmen selling
Bigger, better deals.

Consumer gluttons, we transfuse
The streams out on the streets
That give the city life and breath,
And road beneath our feet.

December 21st, 2009 | Tags: Poetry | Category: Random | Leave a comment

You…yeah, you.

You’re just not funny. Stop. Please, just…stop.

December 15th, 2009 | Tags: That Guy | Category: Random | Leave a comment

We’re seeing some shades of what we will see much of once the government has their fingers in healthcare. In a nutshell, government spending constitues a greater and greater percentage of total healthcare dollars in this country. So, rather than finding a way to get out of the game of being the teat for the grand majority of the nation’s elderly, poor, and infirmed, Uncle Sam is insisting that costs must somehow decrease. Inexplicably, to assist in meeting this end, they are looking to extend the number of people on their rolls (increasing healthcare demand), create one-size-fits-all policy regulation (increasing demand - ’cause now Aunt Hilda can get a facelift for only a $20 co-pay), and taxing a variety of medical devices (decreasing supply), with the remainder of costs being hefted by a tax on the wealthy, and a huge cut of the only privatized chunk of medicare available (decreasing competition). You do the economic math.

Some of the policy regulation is already being debated - asking which things will be required to be in any given insurance policy. Recent debates have been sparked by various federal recommendations regarding mammograms, prostate cancer screening and papsmears. The scary side of evidence based comparative effectiveness research is that, given the money crunch, it will be used to make economic decisions as well as medical ones.

As others have pointed out, the muddled message trumpeting preventative care (as bread to the huddled masses) while on the other hand limiting access to such care will continue to create healthcare quagmires. The frustrating short of it is that the government knows what’s best for you, and intends to give you just that and nothing more. The scary part is when such tests will be illegal (in the name of cost-cutting) even when you are able to pay for the test. I cannot wait for the government to decide that the average person has three colds a year, and that it is not cost effective for any doctor to treat any person for more than this. Rationing indeed.

Some may claim that it is a slippery slope to react to these (relatively) small debates at this level, assuming that they will develop into something much more sinister. But again, we’ve heard many instances of political policy driving medical decisions such as this from the two most similar nations to us which have government run healthcare: Canada and Britain. But in the words of James Taranto, don’t worry: Paul Krugman assures you, “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”

December 10th, 2009 | Tags: Articles, Healthcare | Category: Musings, Political | Leave a comment

Some updates on the layout:

I used to not use tags at all, thinking that I would simply add a new category for every, well, category of post. But, I’ve found that this sub-classification works better. This way, if you read a particular post of mine, and then, in turn, decide you’d like to see everything I’ve ever posted on pertaining to Obama, Running, or Shameless Self Promotion, you can simply click on that tag rather than sifting through all of the posts in a particular category. So, have fun with that.

I’ve also updated some links. I had some dead blogs out there, and a serious handful added which I’d like to read more often. Enjoy.

December 7th, 2009 | Tags: Shameless Self Promotion | Category: Housekeeping | Comments Off