Spotlight: Spring 2002

Homeland security?

“On October 22, 1939 [on the brink of WWII), at the church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, C. S. Lewis preached at evensong. To anxious undergraduates, many of whom would soon face death, and all of whom must have wondered what they were doing studying mathematics or metaphysics when their nation was in mortal peril, Lewis said: ‘If we had foolish unchristian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.’ . . . Great though the beauty and joy of life often is, there is no security to be found there.”

—Gilbert Meilaender in Christian Century, September 26, 2001, quoted by Martin Marty in Context, December 1, 2001.

All music is worship

“I think that all music—not just Christian music but all music—is worship music, because every song is amplifying the value of something. There’s a trail of our time, our affections, our allegiance, our devotion, our money. That trail leads to a throne, and whatever’s on that throne is what we worship. We’re all doing a great job of it because God has created us to be worshipers. The problem is that a lot of us have really bad gods.”

—Louie Giglio in Plugged In, October 2001, quoted in Current Thoughts & Trends, December 2001.

Reality Check

“I keep a quotation from William Stringfellow above my desk, something published in The Witness in 1985. Stringfellow said, ‘The most obstinate misconception associated with the gospel of Jesus Christ is that the gospel is welcome in this world. This conviction—endemic among church folk—persists that, if problems of misapprehension or misrepresentation are overcome, and the gospel is heard on its own integrity, the gospel will be found attractive to people, become popular and a success of some sort. The idea is curious and ironic because it is bluntly contradicted in  Scripture and in the experience of the continuing biblical witness in history.’ . . . Either Stringfellow was crazy, or much of the church-growth thinking is deceptive.”

—David B. Rivers in The Living Church, August 20, 2000, quoted by Martin Marty in Context, November 15, 2000.

Selling your city?

Before the September 11 attacks, local leaders in many cities were already trying to pool their resources and build their image to attract businesses. But now, “the apparent stability and quality of life offered by smaller and lesser-known cities, well away from the national capitals of commerce and business, have become even bigger selling points,” says Rebecca Gardyn, senior editor of American Demographics.

—American Demographics, January 2002.

Losing Privacy; gaining security?

“Privacy? History. Surveillance is here. And as the line between the public and private sectors blurs, the data will flow like never before.

“For now, the information about each of us resides in dozens of separate databases owned by the credit card companies, the phone carriers, the rental car agencies and police departments, the ISPs and the IRS. But the aftermath of September 11 could change all that by creating in many of us an appetite for information and a willingness to be monitored. And this raises a disquieting possibility: Will the disparate elements of our surveillance society become a surveillance web? Will the private companies and the government agencies come together to create a superdatabase accessible to . . . whom? Will it strip us not just of personal privacy—we seem resigned, or OK with that—but of public anonymity?

“Worrying is a waste of time. Surveillance is here. It was inevitable. But the surveillance state is not.”

—Adam Penenberg in Wired, December 2001.

Bookin’ it into the future

“Electronic media would appear to offer the prime forms of communication for the future. Television, the Internet, the mobile phone and any number of other innovations present an apparently overwhelming threat to the continuation of the paper-based media . . . The book, in particular, would seem an anachronism. Its production methods, its distribution systems, the physical entity itself, seem to belong not even to the century just finished but to an earlier era altogether. It finds its provenance in a medieval technology, its purpose in a society that could accept a pedestrian form of communication, well suited to sharing the printed word with the few who could read it and afford it. And yet the market for the conventional book remains buoyant. Statistics indicate decline in neither the number of titles published nor sales revenues. In fact, the new media are indeed impinging on the book market, but more slowly than might be imagined. The technologies which have brought us screen-based devices and telephonic communication have also brought dramatic improvements in the speed and economics of book manufacturing and . . . offer highly competitive solutions to both the production and the distribution of conventional books. . . . Books have a competing place in the market.”

— Michael Barnard, Director, Macmillan Publishing Group in Cultural Trends, Volume 9, Issue 36, 1999.

Living Sacrifice . . .

“The devil, things, and people being what they are, it is necessary for God to use the hammer, the file, and the furnace in his holy work of preparing a saint for true sainthood. It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply.”

—A. W. Tozer, quoted in Alliance Life, October 2001.

Home alone no longer

“Call it the ‘Home Alone’ factor. William Strauss, author of Generations (William Morrow, 1992), cites childhood divorce as one of the decisive experiences influencing how Gen Xers shape their own families. Above all, they want to avoid creating the broken homes, alimony disputes, absentee fathers and tangles with stepparents that many of them experienced as children. . . .”

—Pamela Paul in American Demographics, January 2002.

What your peers are reading

1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling

2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban, by J.K. Rowling

3. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J.K. Rowling

4. Taliban, by Ahmed Rashid

5. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris

6. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: A Novel, by Michael Chabon

7. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

8. John Adams, by David McCullough

9. Personal History, by Katharine Graham

10. The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant

—Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2002.