Tom Beaudoin, in Virtual Faith, explores the medium of cyberspace as a place for theologically significant communities of faith for Generation X. Instead of face to face community, we’re talking about community mediated by the screen.
In his chapter on experience for Generation X, Tom takes the quest for speed (note this was 1998) and full presence and connects it with the quests for full interpersonal interaction and transcendence of human experience. I’m not convinced that many internet users would see their online experience in theological terms. But I do believe that behind the growing compulsion to connect online there is the hunger that Tom alerts us to.
The blogging community that connects the Emerging Church movement around the world, particularly in the United States and UK. To break into it one has to establish not just a web presence (read web site) but take part in conversation on a weekly if not daily basis. As a blogger I know that people will not read what I write unless it is updated regularly and relates to fresh experience or new material. Take Tall Skinny Kiwi as an example. He’s just turned up at an Emerging Church conference and met people who comment on his blog. Yesterday’s blog consisted of greetings from them all!
The development of online presence is being taken seriously by the Gen Xers, but is being taken further by the Millennials. I’m experiencing that in my own home. Livejournal is addictive. Visiting other journals, commenting, and responding to comments is a time consuming business. But even more addictive is the Neopets chat boards scene. A user can be sucked in with the anxiety that people will forget you if you don’t participate. There are so many people out there to connect with. And of course, online games are designed to be addictive.
The positive attraction of the virtual community is that you can search for and connect with people who have similar interests and passions rather than the people who live in the same street or suburb. An internet user can try out different personas as he or she reinvents himself. This means that religious or spiritual conversation can be part of reinvention. However, as Beaudoin points out, we should not avoid the difficult religious tasks of loving and seeking justice in the ‘real world’.
The phrase ‘real world’ does have problems. The people I connect with online are real people. The issues we deal with are real. Some of these are flesh and blood relatives. Others are people I will never meet. But that does not diminish the reality of our connection. It’s the embodiment that’s missing. However, is there not a case for expressing the incarnation in cyberspace? I’d be keen to find another phrase that helps us distinguish between online and offline community. Maybe I’ve used the terms that most accurately describe what I’m looking for.
Had coffee with John Telfer Brown this morning. John’s the pastor of North Gold Coast Christian Church, an AOG church plant that meet at Helensvale State High School. We met through a shared interest in blogging and church planting.
John’s been a prolific blogger since the beginning of 2005. He publishes his first comments at 5 am most mornings. A lot of the blogging pastors I’ve come across are under the 40 year age group. This guy’s well over that age. He’s a native of Scotland and has the accent to prove it. He’s got a passion and wit to rival Billy Connolly any day. He makes a good coffee and tells a good yarn as well.
So what’s he blogging aboot? Daily Encouragement posted early in the morning: Devotions with stories, news commentary and prayer. Reflection on the lives and work of preachers such as George Whitefield. References to his favourite AFL team, St Kilda. And later in the day, a reflection or reference to other blogs of note. John’s managed to get his wife and a few of the leaders of the church to set up blogs as well.
I appreciated tapping into the wisdom of a veteran church planter. John’s not not too hung up on the size of the congregation. He has a passion for reaching members of his community and people all over the world. We’re from different parts of the theological spectrum - but we share a love for God and a passion for connecting with the Gold Coast in the name of Christ.
Tonight I went with the family to the opening night of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was excellent.
It was different to the radio series, book and television series. Apparently Douglas Adams had a policy of adding or changing something every time he produced a new format. He was the key script writer and one of the producers for the movie. It’s so sad that he died in May 2001, at the age of 49. I remember the shock of hearing the news.
The official Hitchhikers Movie website is at hitchhikers.movies.go.com
It includes an excellent trailer and plenty of interactive material.
The movie starts with the dolphins. At first with an entry from the Hitchhiker’s guide, and then in full colour, wide screen glory. There’s not a lot of visual magic - we treated more to big budget of the Doctor Who style of science fiction. The theme music from the television series, “Journey of the Sorcerer”, originally by the Eagles, is used in the movie as well.
As I said earlier, there a few bonus pieces added in by Adams. Like John Malkovich playing the specially created character of Humma Kavula, the leader of a cult that worships the God who created the universe by sneezing it out of his nostril. The Vogons stay active in the plot as the StarWars-like Empire fleet dragged down by bureacracy. The movie is full of oblique references to Star Wars in fact, but always in the sense of “what would be the opposite of the Star Wars plot”. There’s a romantic interest in the movie, an interest that was kept for later in the series when in book form.
[eminimall products="Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"]
Look out for the collection of planets in Slarti Baartfast’s study - one is in the shape of Douglas Adams’ head. Also look for the entry to Humma Kavula’s cathedral, which is in fact a 10 foot high rendition of Douglas Adams’ nose. Halfway through the credits there’s a bonus section from the Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Ennis, my wife, discovered a class set of the first book at school and is getting ready to teach it.
I’m wondering if the rest of the series will be or has been made. We’ll see.
We have, somewhere in the house, a copy of The Salmon of Doubt, a collection of Douglas Adams’ writings ranging from a childhood letter to the editor through to notes for his incomplete third Dirk Gently novel.
Adams explores in an essay his ponderings about God, science and the origins of the universe. He comes across as a secular scientist who has trouble buying the concept of personal creator. That’s no surprise, considering the number of references to weird and wonderful concepts of creation in the Hitchhikers series. He’s introduced us to pluralism at an astronomical level.
Karl Mannheim could be regarded as the grandfather of generational research. Born in Hungary 1893, he moved to Germany to study philosophy and sociology, with a particular emphasis on the roots of culture. He worked under Alfred Weber, brother of well-known sociologist Max Weber. His essays on the sociology of knowledge are now regarded as classics. Mannheim moved to Britain where he attempted a comprehensive analysis of the structure of modern society by way of democratic social planning and education.
From Wikipedia: Mannheim’s book Ideologie und Utopie (1929) was the most widely debated book by a living sociologist in Germany during the Weimar Republic; the English version Ideology and Utopia (1936) has been a standard in American-style international academic sociology. Mannheim was not the author of any work he himself considered a finished book, but rather of some fifty major essays and treatises, most later published in book form.
It is one of those essays that sparked off generational research. “On the problem of generations”, published in German in 1928, outlined Mannheim’s analysis of the impact of generational experience on groups of people across class and geographical lines.
The essay was published English in 1952 in Collected Works of Karl Mannheim, Vol. 5, Routledge, London. The set of complete works was published again in 1996 by Bryan Turner. The set of resource is so huge and expensive it is only ever bought by libraries.
June Edmunds and Bryan Turner, in their 2002 book, Generations, Culture and Society, explore the implications of Mannheim’s pivotal essay. Rather than seeing generations as continuations of societal norms, Mannheim portrayed generations as “sources of opposition, challenging existing societal norms and values and bringing social change through collective generational organisation”.
The three building blocks of Mannheim’s theory of generation, as identified by Bryan Turner and June Edmunds, are:
1. Generational Site or Location
Mannheim taught that a generation could be defined in terms of collective response to a traumatic event or catastrophe that united particular cohort of individuals into a self-conscious age stratum. Mannheim was aware of the angst faced by German youth in the wake of World War I, not only in response to trench warfare, but also the poverty and shame associated with international mood.
2. Generation as Actuality
Mannheim critiqued the Marxist tradition of class analysis and deterministic approach to consciousness or knowledge. Age groups, he observed, were able to act as agents of social change and become carriers of intellectual and organisational alternatives to the status quo.
3. Generational Units
Mannheim wrote about ‘articulate structures of knowledge or consciousness that express particular location’. Even though each generation may include within itself a number of ‘differentiated, antagonistic generation-units’ who fight one another, they belong to each other because of their orientation toward each other.
Tom Beaudoin, in his book, Virtual Faith, helps us explore the emerging spirituality of a generation turned off by institutional religion. This generation inherits the Boomers’ focus on personal experience and express it in ‘edgy’ ways.
Tom uses popular music video to engage in theological reflection, considering the connection between personal experience, theological tradition and popular culture.
In this chapter the focus is primarily on Madonna’s music video, “Like A Prayer”, directed by Mary Lambert in 1989 and available on the DVD, Immaculate Collection. (also available streamed at MTV). In the video Madonna appears to have been caught up in a police chase in which an African American man is wrongfully arrested. She flees to a church and has a sensual/religious experience involving what appears to be St Martin de Pores, an Afro-Peruvian saint.
Tom picks up on the ’sacramentals’ in the video - a term used to describe things set apart or blessed by the Catholic Church to inspire good thoughts and increase devotion. Tom describes sacramentals as miniature personal signs of God and God’s grace in the world.
Another angle taken from the video is the connection between sensuality and spirituality. There is a a fusion of the two when Madonna kisses the feet of Saint Martin. It’s the combination found in soul music, such as the music of Al Green in “Down to the river” in which a teenage sexual experience and full immersion baptism are tied together in one song. This connection is not new. It was made by many of the mystics, sucn as Bernard of Clairvaux and Teresa of Avila. Sensual/sexual language seeps into the praise and worship songs of the Boomers and GenXers.
Madonna’s video represents a challenge to the polarisation of body and spirit often found in Western and Eastern Christianity. Rather than grapple towards a healthy earthy acceptance of the body and emotions, many Christian leaders have urged their followers to lock it all away. There’s a fear that it will all go horribly wrong. GenX artists though, such as Tori Amos, are responding to the ‘horribly wrong’ expression of sexuality that is linked with repression and abuse.
U2’s songs and music videos, not considered in Beaudoin’s book, provide a similar approach to sexuality and spirituality. Bono’s lyrics expresses a longing and desire that could be related to the divine as much as the girl across the room. Tom points out that each desire may illuminate the other.
Tom includes here a section body piercing and the bare midriff fashion. Tom here refers to ear piercing and associated trends as an example of the search for experience that makes a mark. “To pierce one’s body is to leave a permanent mark of intense physical experience, whether pleasurable or painful”.
I’ve enjoyed seeing Christian billboards and t-shirts with the phrase, “Body Piercing saved my life”, referring to the piercing of Jesus’ hands and feet. It challenges the prudishness often found in the church on this issue!
Tom helps us explore the meaning of Jesus’ embodiment of the human and divine during his life as much as in his death. I’ve seen a very useful book on this issue at Practicing Our Faith. It’s Honoring the Body, by Stephanie Paulsell. Stephanie in her chapter of Practicing Our Faith takes a look at three spiritual disciplines: bathing, adornment and touching. She fearlessly engages with the sexuality issues and brings us back to an affirming approach to embodiment founded in the resurrected body of Jesus. This is welcome reprieve for a culture that uses songlines like “make my flesh life melt away”.
“Jesus’ resurrected body teaches us that bodies matter and shows us the beauty God intends for all bodies. How might Jesus’ broken body help us to see the bodies of the sick and wounded and exploited? As we seek God and each other in our bodies, as we pay attention to ways to honor the body, we remember that every body is blessed by God, deserving of protection and care.”
Australian and New Zealand Armed Corps were formed at Gallipoli ninety years ago in preparation for the landing at Gallipoli in Turkey. On Monday we marked the disastrous landing with ceremonies all over Australia and New Zealand, and in Gallipoli itself.
What struck me again this year was the difference between Australian and New Zealand spin.
The New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, attended the dawn service, the Australian service and the New Zealand service. John Howard, the Australian PM, didn’t go to the NZ service and went to an Ozzie barbecue instead. Claims he didn’t know they were on at different times.
Helen in her speech constantly referred to Australia and New Zealand together. John only talked about Australia. The feature article in The Australian on the weekend talked about Gallipoli as if the Australians were the only ones involved.
I’ve posted a NZ television ad for DB on Duncan’s TV Ad Land. It features a WWI veteran in DB Heaven, deciding on the merits or lack of merits of beer drinkers. All in good fun.
I’ve often said that if Baby Boomers rebelled against instutitions, Gen Xers have merely ignored them. Tom Beaudoin, in his book, Virtual Faith, explores popular culture to unpack Gen X suspicion of religious institutions.
Tori Amos’s Crucify Video, directed by Cindy Palmano, is included in the 1992 video, Little Earthquakes.
On the tape the clip is introduced with the images of a swinging cross and a gilded bird cage. Beaudoin reads this sequence as an attack on the Church as an institution that “selfishly cages its glinting, dubious truth and hyptnotizes its adherents with a gilded message.”
The video itself features a baptism. From the Tori Amos site, Hereinmyhead, we’re told “Cindy was always weaving in a sub text - Elizabeth the first getting baptized and then doing her saucy strumpet shimmy after being blessed, of course.”
REM’s “Losing My Religion”, directed by Tarsem Singh, won many awards when it was released in 1991. Beaudoin zeroes in on the image of spilled milk, one of the many symbols used in the clip that express loss of the sacred. The video is available on REM’s VHS & DVD video, “This Film Is On”, and on In View: The Best of REM 1988 - 2003.
Soundgarden’s 1994 video, Black Hole Sun, features four ’sinister ministers’ who ravage the lives of middle class suburban consumers. Beaudoin uses this video to highlight Xers’ “righteous rage ata Christian Church that has fused and confused itself with the American dream so deeply”. The video is available on MTV20 Rock.
In his section on ‘electronically leveled institutions’, Beaudoin explores the subversive capacity of the cyberworld. He admits that hierachy and institutional power still make their presence known on the Net. However he points to the pluralist nature of the web community in which ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ religious groups and traditions exist side by side. The sheer number of people writing on behalf of their religious perspective underminses the ability of any person or group to speak on behalf of all.
The online community provides institutions the capacity to reinvent themselves in a fluid environment. Christian leaders who engage in online conversation have to find a voice that is not compromised by unthinking allegiance to middle class values. Likewise GenXers exploring their own spirituality are able to consider ways in which they can deconstruct the religious institution, redeveloping a new approach even while holding on their irreverence.
Beaudoin considers the significance of the crucifix as fashion statement. He points to the Madonna 1984 video hit, Like a Virgin, as a symbol of the ambiguous use of a Catholic talisman. While it is a poke at the religiosity of previous generations of Catholics, there is a sense of connection with an honoured spirituality. At the same time, this is an exposure of the pre-Xer use of the crucifix as fashion statement.
Tom continues the anti-Catholic theme with the Nirvana video, Heart-shaped box. Slant magazine puts this video as number 81 in their list of the 100 greatest music videos. Their review:
Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” is as ripe with allusions as it is oversaturated with color (the video was shot in black and white and then computer-colorized).
Directed by Anton Corjbin, the clip features surrealistic images including a winged, gluttonous woman reaching for plastic fetuses hanging from a tree and an emaciated Jesus with a Victorian beard and Santa hat climbing onto a cross.
While the song makes vague references to cancer, umbilical cords and meat-eating orchids, the video entangles faith and sickness with the clarity of a man who’s damn close to giving up his eternal search.”
Beaudoin uses this hostile video clip to remind Catholic readers they must rediscover Jesus as a vital figure at the heart of their lives. He picks up on the depiction of Jesus as an old man, in both the Nirvana and REM clips, and asks if the Christian Church has distanced itself from the dangerous memory of Jesus’ revolutionary practice. Good point.
Beaudoin is unpacking what he means by irreverence. This is a term many older people find hard to grasp. Religious institutions are knocked off the pedestal of guaranteed awe and respect. Symbols and ideas held precious by previous generations are subjected to derision and mockery.
Irreverence is not a new phenomenon. Dave Allen, Irish comedian who died only a month ago, was the master of irreverence. He made his mark back in the 1970s when he impersonated the Pope doing a strip tease. I remember watching Dave Allen on TV with my parents. Dad was laughing his head off. Mum was constantly offended. Take a look at Dave’s obituary at the Guardian.
Although irreverence is not new, it is certainly becoming the hallmark of GenX communciation and behaviour. I think this trend has been entrenched in Australian culture for some time, much more than in American culture. Just take a look at ABC’s CNNN to see what I mean. Beaudoin’s use of music videos shows us that irreverence has bled out of the comedy sketch, picked up a strong dose of irony, and showed its strength in GenX popular culture as a whole.
In Virtual Faith Tom sets out to provide a theological interpretation of GenX pop culture, exploring what he calls an ‘irreverent spirituality’.
GenX Journey
Tom’s first chapter is a helpful exploration of pivotal events that shaped him and his peers. Born in 1969, he spent his teenage years in the 1980s; themes of family breakdown, technological advancement and the threat of nuclear war witnessed alongside movies such as Kramer Versus Kramer, Star Wars, The Day After. As a teenager he became a consumer of popular culture, as expressed in radio, MTV, popular film, television, comic books, cartoons, clothing, fantasy gaming, sports and concerts. Tom played bass guitar in bands, at first playing only ‘Christian’ music, then moving to ’secular’ music. As a College (University) student he experiemented with the spiritualities connected with a reform synagogue, a moderate Southern Baptist church and a progressive Catholic Church. Beaudoin taught high school for two years before taking up graduate studies in religion.
Tom refers to his time studying theology at Harvard Divinity School, including a course by Harvey Cox, who has written the foreward. What amazes me is that Cox, known for his 1965 book, The Secular City, is still teaching and writing!
Formed by Pop Culture
In his second chapter Beaudoin outlines his thesis that Generation X, born roughly in the 1960s and 1970s, share experiences of popular cultural ‘events’. He is referring to a variety of pop culture phenomena including bodily costuming, music videos, cyberspace, movies, popular songs, television shows, board games, products and trends. He contends that Generation Xers live religiously mostly through the popular culture. In addition he identifies the ways in which his generation share a widespread regard for paganism and mysticism. Religious institutions are spurned as people take the symbols, values and rituals from various religious traditions and combine them into their personal spirituality.
Beaudoin is upfront about his focus on white middle class members of his generation. “My book begs for conversation with studies that explore other groups and cultures within the generation.”
Tom reminds his readers that there is no theology apart from life in the world, from life in culture. “In order to understand our culture, we must think theologically. And in order to comprehend our theology, we must know our culture”. He uses the word “religious” rather than “religion” to avoid the institutional connotations rejected by his peers. The ‘religious’ involves a profound experience of a limitation, a hunger for depth.
Foundational to Tom’s engagement with popular culture is the belief that people (or forms of pop culture) who profess to know little or nothing about the religious may form, inform or transform religious meaning for people of faith. He refers to the Catholic concept of “Sensus Fidelium”, literally the “sense of the faithful.” Just as the Spirit guides the Church’s teachers and leaders, the faithful, as a whole, have an instinct or “sense” about when a teaching is � or is not � in harmony with the true faith. Tom goes one step further with the term “sensus infidelium”.
Being Virtually Religious
The third chapter is the one that has stayed with me longest. Beaudoin begins by referring to an article by Katherine Bergeron, “The Virtual Sacred: Finding God at Tower Records“, the cover story of The New Republic, February 27, 1995. (Katherine is Associate Professor of Music at College of Letters and Science at Berkeley University).
In her article Bergeron explores the dynamics behind the popularity of the Gregorian chant as evidenced in the massive sales of Chant: The The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo De Silos. She points out that the recording is a simulation of 19th century chant, itself a simulation of 9th century chant. In her analysis of the spirituality associated with engaging with this ‘timeless music’ she concludes that this vitual religiousness does not demand anything of the listener.
Beaudoin responds to this critique by reminding us that ‘virtual religious experiences’ do demand something of us as they expose the amount of simulation that happens in what we have assumed to be ‘real’ religious experiences. He points to the term ‘religiosity’ which in popular culture has come to refer to affected or fake sort of piety.
Tom finishes this chapter with the four major religious themes he will explore in the rest of the book:
1. Deep suspicion of religious institutions
2. Emphasis on the sacred nature of experience
3. Religious dimension of suffering
4. Exploration of faith and ambiguity
Hugh Mackay’s third generational slice is the first wave of children of early Baby Boomers, born in the 1970s. These people are now aged from twenty five to thirty five. In 1997, when Mackay’s book, “Generations” was published, they were seventeen to twenty seven.
Mackay identifies a number of patterns emerging from his research with this age group.
Individuality
Although there is a conformity in dress, slang and attitudes, Mackay’s subjects do not want to be lumped together under one generalisation. Unlike the Boomers, they’re not flattered with labels. At the end of his section on the Options generation, Mackay makes the comment:
“When members of the Options Generation plead to be regarded as individuals, they have a point: considering that the kaleidoscope of social change creates unpredictable patterns, the process of adaptation is bound to be highly individualistic. … They are the products of fragmentation, diversity and unpredictability.”
Options Open
Mackay observes that this generation have learned to postpone long-term commitments in favour of short-term goals and temporary solutions. They’ve grown up in an environment marked by constant change and uncertainty. They live and breathe it without the anxiety of their parents or grandparents.
This generation take for granted gender equality in education and employment. They expect both parents to be working outside the home but know that they themselves face the likelihood of unemployment. Family configuration is hardly a talking point as there is little sense of ‘normal family life’. This generation in Australia have grown up with the idea of multiculturalism, have little sense of connection with the Britain’s royalty, and have always been aware of AIDS. The guys in particular face a relatively high rate of suicide compared with previous generations and other parts of the world.
Mackay comments on this generation’s preference to ‘remain as non-committal as possible, for as long as possible’. Stability and predictability - even as goals - seem rather incongruous. Older generations are puzzled by the resulting reluctance to make long-term commitments to one course of study, one job, one sexual partner, one political party, one set of religious beliefs. What appears to be apathy or premature conservatism is more a case of ‘making it up as we go along’ - pouring passion and commitment into short term goals.
Here I find Mackay carefully comparing this generation with earlier generations at a similar life stage. Previous generations had expectations about a ‘preordained sequence of events’ surrounding marriage, family and long-term career. This slice of Australians can see that the future is much more open than that.
Independence Paradox
If the Baby Boomers carved out adolesence as a life stage, the Options Generation took adolesence and stretched it out into their twenties. They are likely to stay at home longer, study longer and look for more government income support (unemployment benefit). The challenge in all this is the development of a sense of independence linked with handling flexibility, voluntarily and involuntarily. That independence must be linked a mental framework that isn’t tied to employment.
Moral Boundary Riders
“Boundary-rider” is an Australian term for a person responsible for the maintenance of fences on a station or stock farm. It’s also slang for a sports journalist who reports from the side lines and can interview players during the course of the game.
Mackay tells us that because of the delay in finding long-term employment, the Options generation have extended the years of rebellion. Anti-social behaviour linked with sex, alcohol, drug abuse, non-conformist hair, clothes and language, carries on into the twenties. These twenty somethings test the limits as they build their own moral framework through reflection on experience.
It’s here that Mackay uses Walter Truett Anderson to explore the development of home grown systems of morality, as expressed in Anderson’s book, Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be. Anderson argues that morality is the product of hard-won wisdom and is constructed and reconstructed throughout life. Mackay points out that while many young Australians do not explicitly identify the moral issues they face, they are forced to make decisions about lifestyle eventually.
Mackay expresses concern that despair, depression and alienation are all that is left for those young people who find no meaning in education, live in discouraging family environments or become rejected by hostile labour markets.
On the other hand, Mackay reminds us, there are many young people who take the initiative and move from hedonist nihilism to a positive, constructive approach to life. Some of these will buy into religious fundamentalism, impatient with the journey of ambiguities. Others will attempt to live life to the max.
Marriage and Family? Not Yet, Thanks
If the Lucky Generation saw marriage as an end in itself, and the Boomers focused more on the quality of the marriage relationship, the Options generation tend to focus on the quality of relationship, with marriage as a secondary consideration. A good relationship may last ten years or a lifetime, and may or may not be recognised legally. Friendship is valued over sex. The Options generation don’t tend to pair off early as the Boomers did. They postpone marriage and parenthood as long as possible. Mackay notes that the parenthood is the significant milestone in a relationship rather than the wedding.
It’s at this point that Mackay refers to the ‘Post Boomers’ - born in the 1960s. (Hurrah!) These products of a child-centred culture now focus on ‘creating a lifestyle’ that is less child centred. It’s the Friends and Seinfeld generation we’re talking about here.
There’s an expectation that members of the Options generation will have several serious sexual relationships along the way to marriage. And that there may be more than one marriage. Women, in particular, have less sense than their mothers of needing marriage as a ‘passport to identity or security’.
The ideal, for this generation, is to establish themselves financially, develop a strong and successful emotional relationship, and then decide whether or not to get married and have children. There’s a sense of realism that lacks romantic edge.
The children of the Option Generation are likely to experience more time in child care centres than those of previous generations.
Mackay notes that Options women have set themselves the goal of experiencing the full range of options available to them, but not all at once.
Gender Revolution
Men and women are equal but different. Equal opportunities for men and women should be taken for granted. Men and women should be able to negotiate roles and responsibilities at home and work in ways which respect the needs and preferences of each.
These are the professed values prevalent in the people Mackay talked to. Women live and breathe them. Men aspire to them but struggle to put them into practice. Mackay points out that the messages from these guys’ mothers were in conflict with the examples of their fathers.
An interesting development is the capacity of this generation’s women to maintain close relationships with members of the opposite gender without implying sexual attraction or entanglements. However these women are still prone to experience prejudice, sexual harrassment and discrimination, particularly from men of older generations.
Concluding thoughts
Mackay refers his readers to the 1996 research on young people’s attitudes to technology commissioned by Australian Science, Technology and Engineering Council. (Due to government restructuring this group is now known as the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council.) Richard Eckersley resulting address to the Australian Secondary Principal’s Association is available online at www.aspa.asn.au/conecker.htm
Eckersley (see his web site) points out that only one third of people surveyed believed that life would be better in 2010 than in 1996. The postponement of commitment, grounded in cynicism and disillusion, could lead to a civilisation without confidence or reference points.
Mackay reflects on his impression that pop culture is more kaleidoscopic than it was in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. There is no one kind of music that reaches all members of the Options Generation. Rock music itself, since the days of punk music, has become more artist driven, spinning off into a large number of genres each with their own fan base.
Interviewees from the Option Generation were concerned that younger teenagers were in danger of being sucked into a new cultural conformity, ’shaped by the idioms of the information revolution’.
Mackay’s finishes his book with the thought that the Option Generation can teach their elders how to live with ambiguity and uncertainty without fear.
Jesus said to his disciples:
If you love me, you will do as I command.
Then I will ask the Father to send you the Holy Spirit
who will help you and always be with you.
The Spirit will show you what is true.
The people of this world cannot accept the Spirit,
because they don’t see or know him.
But you know the Spirit,
who is with you and will keep on living in you.
I won’t leave you like orphans.
I will come back to you.
In a little while the people of this world
won’t be able to see me, but you will see me.
And because I live, you will live.
Then you will know
that I am one with the Father.
You will know that you are one with me,
and I am one with you.
If you love me, you will do what I have said,
and my Father will love you.
I will also love you and show you what I am like.
John 14:15-21 (Contemporary English Version)
So did Jesus actually say all this? A large number of Biblical scholars are of the opinion that post-resurrection sayings of Jesus can not be attributed to the historical Jesus. These are the words of the post-Easter Christ rather than the actual Jesus. The Jesus Seminar takes this assumption and provides some kind of system for discounting these words as historical.
I believe it is valid to point out that our approach to historical record is different to the first century approach to history. However the assertion that we cannot rely on any post-resurrection words is based on an objection to the premise of a physical resurrection. “Because Jesus was dead he cannot have said these words”.
My take on this reading is that it’s a collection of sayings rather than a narrative.
So what’s the good news here? For me? For my neighbours?
Jesus is inviting his followers to move beyond a linear empirical approach to understanding God’s presence. “You’ll be able to see me but not in the way you’re used to.” He’s getting them used to the idea that God’s guiding presence will be available 24/7 no matter where they are.
Again and again Jesus’ words speak of relationship with God, available to his followers. 2000 years later I’m still able to access the presence of Jesus through the Spirit of God. Even though I don’t speak the language that Jesus did (Aramaic & maybe Greek) I’m able to be in conversation with God, the creator whose presence infuses every part of creation.
Duncan Macleod posts on life, faith and culture in Australia, drawing from his involvement in the creative industry, the Uniting Church, the blogosphere, generational research, the emerging church and life on the Gold Coast.
Tom Beaudoin, in Virtual Faith, explores the medium of cyberspace as a place for theologically significant communities of faith for Generation X. Instead of face to face community, we’re talking about community mediated by the screen.
Had coffee with 
Ennis, my wife, discovered a class set of the first book at school and is getting ready to teach it.
Karl Mannheim could be regarded as the grandfather of generational research. Born in Hungary 1893, he moved to Germany to study philosophy and sociology, with a particular emphasis on the roots of culture. He worked under Alfred Weber, brother of well-known sociologist Max Weber. His essays on the sociology of knowledge are now regarded as classics. Mannheim moved to Britain where he attempted a comprehensive analysis of the structure of modern society by way of democratic social planning and education.
In this chapter the focus is primarily on Madonna’s music video, “Like A Prayer”, directed by Mary Lambert in 1989 and available on the DVD, Immaculate Collection. (also available 
Tom helps us explore the meaning of Jesus’ embodiment of the human and divine during his life as much as in his death. I’ve seen a very useful book on this issue at 
Tori Amos’s Crucify Video, directed by Cindy Palmano, is included in the 1992 video, Little Earthquakes.
REM’s “Losing My Religion”, directed by Tarsem Singh, won many awards when it was released in 1991. Beaudoin zeroes in on the image of spilled milk, one of the many symbols used in the clip that express loss of the sacred. The video is available on REM’s 
Tom wrote his first book as an expression of three years research at 
Formed by Pop Culture
, Mouw exposes the snobbishness of theologians who would learn from third world popular culture but who overlook the popular culture in their backyard.
In her article Bergeron explores the dynamics behind the popularity of the Gregorian chant as evidenced in the massive sales of 
Hugh Mackay’s third generational slice is the first wave of children of early Baby Boomers, born in the 1970s. These people are now aged from twenty five to thirty five. In 1997, when Mackay’s book, “Generations” was published, they were seventeen to twenty seven.
It’s here that Mackay uses Walter Truett Anderson to explore the development of home grown systems of morality, as expressed in Anderson’s book, 
Mackay refers his readers to the 1996 research on young people’s attitudes to technology commissioned by Australian Science, Technology and Engineering Council. (Due to government restructuring this group is now known as the 
