Finding God, Getting the Pump & the Gen Z Gender Divide
Here’s your weekly(-ish) roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, January 14–27, 2024.
Thought-Provoking Content
The Pulse of Natality—What We’re Missing About Falling Birthrates by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk in Fusion:
Cash incentives and tax relief won’t get people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, and for their children.
Peace in Ukraine Has Never Seemed Further Away by Aris Roussinos in UnHerd:
That the war will end in a peace deal rather than total battlefield victory now looks the best achievable outcome for Ukraine. What remains to be decided is when, and what peace terms are both politically acceptable and militarily achievable.
Negotiations at some point will be necessary—yet whether the best time for them has already passed, or is yet to come, is a question as unanswerable as it is urgent.
Opinion: Psychology Explains Why the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict Is So Intractable by Nafees Hamid at CNN:
The research points to the importance of social-emotional needs being addressed first, as they underpin the unwillingness to compromise on the material issues.
Carrot-and-stick policies, such as the promise of foreign aid coupled with the threat of sanctions, backfire when presented to those holding sacred values. By contrast, symbolic concessions flip this pattern and act as precursors to further pragmatic negotiations.
All the Carcinogens We Cannot See by Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New Yorker:
The chemical irritant might induce immune cells to produce an inflammatory cascade, and that inflammation, in turn, might make the cancer cells grow.
Smoking increases your risk of lung cancer far more than air pollution, but the number of people exposed to air pollution is so vast that the over-all toll of each may be similar.
Where’s the Next Brick? Finding God Among the Ruins of Christianity by Francis Spufford in Mockingbird:
Incorporating something ancient like Christianity into your life, something that lay outside the range of what you could have invented for yourself, actually makes you more your own.
Reflections on the Evangelical Fracturing, Ten Years In by Jake Meador in Mere Orthodoxy:
The fact that [Keller, Carson, and Piper] spent relatively little time being shaped within a technique obsessed sociological bloc, like American evangelicalism, is perhaps enormously important for understanding their success and relative health.
BAP’s Confessions by Dustin Sebell in First Things:
Alamariu lowers the bar of virtue in order to cope with the pain caused by his inability to accept any of the religions, with their promise of justice in another life.
Getting the Pump: On the Resurrection of the Body by Jordan Castro in Harper’s:
Lifting reminds those lopsided with language that a person is not a mere word: he is liquid, muscle, bone, always in motion in the world. Lifting is a reminder that Life is in the blood. It is blood that atones for one’s life.
Peter Schickele, Composer and Gleeful Sire of P.D.Q. Bach, Dies at 88 by Margalit Fox in The New York Times:
[P.D.Q. Bach] is the aural equivalent of the elaborate staircases in M.C. Escher engravings that don’t actually lead anywhere.
There was the music, which betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral.
While we’re on the subject of novelty music, listen also to this mashup by Bela Fleck. You don't need to know how it works to know that it works:
FYI: The trolley problem is solved.
FWIW by Alan Jacobs in The Homebound Symphony commenting on the Substack Nazi online dust-up:
The goal is not to eliminate Nazis; the goal is to reconstitute the ideological monoculture.
Accused Edmonton City Hall Attacker Makes First Court Appearance by Jonny Wakefield in The Edmonton Journal:
Sarvar is facing six charges for Tuesday’s [Edmonton] city hall attack, in which a gunman entered the civic building through the parkade, fired a rifle and tossed a homemade Molotov cocktail before surrendering to an unarmed security guard.
The Canadian Corps of Commissionaires, a non-profit security company originally created to employ ex-military members, confirmed both Sarvar and the guard who arrested him were employees.
The video addresses a disjointed series of topics, including corruption, inflation, immigration, the cost of housing, “the wokeism disease” and “the genocide that’s going on in Gaza and throughout the world.”
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Church Attendance and Voting for Trump by Ryan Burge in Graphs About Religion:
Donald Trump ran up the score with religiously active evangelicals in 2020 compared to 2016.
The War Within Gen Z by Daniel Cox in Business Insider:
While the gender gap is an enduring feature of American politics, at no time in the past quarter century has there been such a rapid divergence between the views of young men and women.
Based on our interviews, there appears to be a growing eagerness among both young men and women to blame their problems on each other.
A New Global Gender Divide Is Emerging by John Burn-Murdoch in Financial Times:
In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.
The trend in most countries has been one of women shifting left while men stand still, but there are signs that young men are actively moving to the right in Germany.
Music
Black day, stormy night
No love, no hope in sight
Don't cry, He is coming
Don't die without knowing the cross
O saving Victim,
Who opens the door of heaven,
Hostile wars oppress,
Give strength; bring help.
Through the fire and through the flames
You won't even say Your name
You say, “I am that I am”
But who could ever live that way?
Ya Hey, Ya Hey
give the king your judgments o god
give your righteousness to his son
may he judge the people with justice now
and give deliverance to the poor and the children
Devotional
An Intercultural Church Is an Intergenerational Church
By Pastor David Hamstra
As I write this, I have just returned from the annual, start-of-year pastor's meetings of the Alberta Conference of Seventh-day Adventists (a sisterhood of churches of which Edmonton Central is a member). Under the leadership of Pastor Jeff Potts, our conference is establishing priorities for the next five years. Those priorities include an emphasis on the needs of youth and young adults and planting intercultural churches.
Dr. Kenley Hall, a professor at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, taught us about both subjects. Your pastors learned about how monocultural churches—churches operated according to the needs and preferences of a single ethnic group—spring up like the grass of the field only to wither and fade if they do not learn how to become the sort of intercultural church that members can invite their friends to. Dr. Hall also taught us about the metamodern outlook of the younger generations in Canada and how we need to become more accepting of their difficult questions about faith if they are to find a home in our churches. He also shared his testimony about his miraculous healing from paralysis of both his legs due to nerve damage from an autoimmune disorder.
As I listened to these fascinating and inspiring presentations, I realized that what we have at Edmonton Central is something special—something that we must not only preserve but build on: We have the potential to grow as both an intercultural and an intergenerational church.
On the one hand, monocultural churches grow initially through immigration but cease to represent the needs and preferences of different generations after immigration slows down. Then, they focus on preserving the customs and language of the immigrants' home country and lose their young people.
On the other, intercultural churches grow by connecting with the youth culture that youth and young adults, regardless of racial or ethnic origin, adopt as they socialize with their peers in Canadian schools. These are generally the most difficult people in the family to get to church, so the other generations in their family typically go to whatever church they are willing to worship at, even if that church isn't meeting their needs or attending to their preferences. These churches also fade when they fail to keep up with the ever-changing preferences of young people.
But are such churches truly intercultural if they focus on connecting with the youth culture above all other cultures?
I submit that a truly intercultural church must also be intergenerational, reflecting not only diverse ethnic cultures but also its different generational cultures in worship, work, and play. This lets people build relationships across cultures and generations, welcoming individuals of all ages and backgrounds into its partnership. This is incipient at Edmonton Central and what I believe we must continue to grow into.
Monocultural churches and youth and young-adult-focused intercultural churches are effective at reaching certain groups, and we should support these efforts. However, I am committed to what we have at Edmonton Central because the message of unity in cultural diversity is at least as clear in the First Angel's Message as is the Sabbath. In other words, Seventh-day Adventists must foster intercultural and intergenerational churches if we are to be a people identified with the Three Angels' Messages. For, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: "The future of the church is not youth itself but rather the Lord Jesus Christ alone."