earthsedge

It’s the last week of my communications course! I turned in my research paper on Friday, and I give the oral report tomorrow. Just for fun I put the whole text into wordle, and this was the result:

Here are two interesting articles, with two different perspectives.

The first one, a New York Times piece by Russell Shorto, was forwarded to me my boss in Amsterdam. It looks at the Dutch system and what America can learn from it. One of many thought provoking quotes:

There is another historical base to the Dutch social-welfare system, which curiously has been overlooked by American conservatives in their insistence on seeing such a system as a threat to their values. It is rooted in religion. “These were deeply religious people, who had a real commitment to looking after the poor,” Mak said of his ancestors. “They built orphanages and hospitals. The churches had a system of relief, which eventually was taken over by the state. So Americans should get over ‘socialism.’ This system developed not after Karl Marx, but after Martin Luther and Francis of Assisi.”

The second article is an essay by Charles Murray, who is looking at socialism from a totally different angle: the existential consequences. An interesting quote:

Put aside all the sophisticated ways of conceptualizing governmental functions and think of it in this simplistic way: Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things. Sometimes, taking the trouble out of things is a good idea. Having an effective police force takes some of the trouble out of walking home safely at night, and I’m glad it does.

The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality–it drains some of the life from them.

Murray goes on to speak of empty churches and the erosion of meaning in life (what he calls “European Syndrome”) in Europe, and how science will soon validate many of the positions of social conservatives.

Interesting stuff.

A few days ago USA Today had an informative article describing the dramatic decline of  religious groups in America:

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.

The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

“More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ ” says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

There’s no doubt about it: the religious landscape in America is going through some big changes. We will either go the way of Western Europe, or Christianity will look very different in 50 years…

…but on the downside I’m apparently not very original.

I’m thinking about resurrecting “linking the week,” but until then here’s an article on “Christian Hipsters.”

I was surprised to discover that about 75% of what he describes could have been written about me. I am definitely wary of both TBN and evangelicals who get involved in politics. I despise CCM, and I’m not a big fan of mega churches. And the term “soul winning” does makes me cringe, as do sock puppets. I could more or less drop the last  paragraph. But it was the authors he mentioned that really surprised me; with a few exceptions, they’re some of my favorites (e.g. I just finished a book by Marilyn Robinson, and I’m currently reading one by N.T. Wright. This is one of my favorite poems, by Wendell Berry.)

I like what one of the comments said, tongue in cheek: “Should I seek help?”

The funny thing about emerging “cool” demographics is that as soon as you have described them, they lose their appeal. No doubt that in this case that will happen before too long. But until that happens, I would be more likely to embrace being 75% cool if it came with a better name. “Hipster?” That word will forever have a totally different meaning to me. I was trying to pin down some vague memory of this word, and then suddenly it hit me:

There is this cheap textile shop in the Netherlands (I think “Zeemans” but I could be misremembering), and for a few weeks they had this massive ad campaign for these black, lacy panties. At nearly every bus stop in Amsterdam there was a sign with a scantily clad booty and the giant words “THE HIPSTER-NOW ONLY 1.99″ (I may have the price wrong-but you get the picture).

“Christian Hipster”-my mind just doesn’t know what to do with that.

“Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God has made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.”

(Rob Bell, from Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)