'COOL' CHRISTIANITY

T-shirts that say "Jesus Is My Homeboy." Magazines that talk about body piercing on one page and "extreme prayer" on another. The Christian Tattoo Association. This is the next generation of Christianity, according to a recent story called "Christian Cool And the New Generation Gap" by John Leland (reprinted here), which ran on the front page of the New York Times Week in Review section. A "movement" Leland calls "alt-evangelicals" has "gained attention by creating alternative churches in coffee bars and warehouses and publishing new magazines and Bibles that come on as anything but church."

Credit Leland for not taking the familiar angle and reflexively lauding "alt-evangelicalism"'s innovation and edginess. He sounds skeptical by the fourth paragraph: "But does a T-shirt really serve the faith? And if religion is our link to the timeless, what does it mean that young Christians replace their parents' practices?" Leland then records theologian Michael Novak's suspicions that this is watered-down religion. The piece could have better distinguished between the two chief religious mistakes of the baby boomers which "alt-evangelicalism" presumably attempts to correct: on the one hand there is what Leland terms the "deity-free 'church lite'" of the megachurches; on the other is the overly sedate worship of mainline denominations. "My generation is discontent with dead religion," Cameron Strang, the 20-something founder of Relevant Media tells the Times. "Our generation wants a tangible experience of God who is there."

Leland says the significance of the "alt" movement is "more stylistic than doctrinal,"

and so he is generally content to convey a conflict between defenders of tradition and proponents of change. But a larger question is left out: whether it is in a megachurch, a mainline church, or a coffee shop church, can religion really become more meaningful if it fails to foster faith that is both communal and cosmic? That is: will religion that is vertical—an up-and-down connection to God—be only tweaked but never truly improved until it also becomes horizontal—enriching and informing our connection to other believers and to the natural and cultural world? Some of the "alt" Web sites and magazines still reek of the attempt to enhance the believer's "user experience," which isn't communal or cosmic. The Times quotes college students who told a survey they find religion "personally helpful" for "spiritual strength." But religion should go beyond that and foster faith that changes how we see the world and carries a call to heal it. A magazine-like teen Bible profiled in a Timessidebar—which promises "Beauty Secrets" on its cover (the inner kind, we can only hope)—seems to cater to, rather than challenge, its readers' worldview.

That teen-zine cover brings up one last point. The assumption holds throughout the Times piece that teens and young adults are so spiritually immature that the seed of faith won't take root unless it comes in cool packaging. Teenage girls are all Hilary Duff, give or take a layer of makeup, whose attention will waver unless you wave a Christian version of Cosmo before their eyes. For two striking counterexamples to this caricature, read the weblogs of the daughters of theologian Gideon Strauss (whose own blog is an essential bookmark). One discusses C.S. Lewis, Jane Austen, and her love of poetry. The other reflects on her mandolin lessons and evaluates the ontology of Hinduism from a Christian perspective (she's 13 years old). Both come across as young disciples who take seriously the biblical charge to "be transformed by the renewing of your minds." Relevant Media may have a lot to learn before it is relevant to them.

Related: The Los Angeles Times on 'Biblezines'
Earlier:Worship and wholeness: the Calvin Symposium on Worship

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New Republic:

RUHENGERI, Rwanda — The Rwandan Demobilization and Reintegration Center sprawls across a lush plateau near the northern town of Ruhengeri, just beneath the precipitous slopes of the 14,800-foot Mount Karisimbi volcano. With students playing pickup games of soccer and striding purposefully to class, it could be the tidy campus of a polytechnic academy. Yet it is here where some of the most hardened foot soldiers of the genocidal former Hutu regime … are being reeducated and reintroduced to Rwandan society after a decade in exile. "These men fought as mercenaries in the jungles of Africa for eight or nine years," Sam Barigye, a 29-year-old Tutsi who helps run the program, told me as we strolled across the grounds. "They've been brainwashed. They have been isolated. We are trying to tell them what really happened in this country." … As the tenth anniversary of the mass killing approaches, the Rwandan government is stepping up its campaign to compel its citizens to confront the truth about one of the twentieth century's greatest crimes.

From the New York Times :

BLACKPOOL, England — Thirty years ago, 17 million people a year braved frigid seas and draconian bed-and-breakfasts to make the city the working-class resort of the north. Today, with sunny Spain a cheap plane ride away, the number has plunged to 10.6 million. … To recapture its popularity, Blackpool is banking on legislation that would bring Vegas-style gambling resorts to Britain, where casinos are small, highly restricted and free of glitz. If it passes, as it is likely to in some form, Britain would become the first country in Europe to usher in American-style casinos, with their acres of slot machines, restaurants, shops and shows, a change that would significantly change how Britons gamble. … Although Blackpool is remarkably organized and single-minded in its courtship of casinos, it is not alone. The legislation has brought a frenzy of deals and counter deals in nearly every big city in Britain, so many in fact, that the government is torn between delight and distaste.

Related: Las Vegas as a mecca of capitalism, from The Nation

WEEKLY DIGEST

• What do you mean? The better question may be, why do you mean what you mean? In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure stated "that no word is inherently meaningful," says author Paul Greenburg in the Boston Globe's Idea's section. "Rather a word is only a 'signifier,' i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the 'signified,' or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued 'sign.'" Thus semiotics was born. It flourished at Brown University, where students—such as radio host Ira Glass and others who would go on to contend for Pulitzers and Oscars—put culture under their microscope, looking for codes, messages and narratives. Greenburg looks at the legacy of those first semioticists—which includes the "constant irony" of popular culture's self-consciousness—and the rebirth of the discipline today as media studies. (Without semiotics, would we be talking about "alt-evangelicals"?) Story

Related:
Media scholars tuning in to radio's golden age, from the Chronicle of Higher Education
Jazz's influence on literature, from the Chronicle
Gulf between high and popular culture is growing (and irritating), says Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post

• One master of metaphor and meaning was Shakespeare, whose 440th birthday may or may not have passed last month. In a commemorative essay in The Australian, Peter Craven remembers Shakespeare as "at least as great a comic writer as Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw and as turbulent and bottomlessly sad a depicter of heartbreak and horror as August Strindberg or Eugene O'Neill." This artistic breadth—today we would call it "versatility"—is the key to Shakespeare's literary eminence, Craven says. Shakespeare was also prescient, "prefiguring" everything from "romantic poetry [to], as Northrop Frye says, Mozart's operas." In short, Shakespeare "presented through the mask of the entertainer the most comprehensive vision of life we have." Happy birthday, Bill! Essay

Elsewhere: Speaking of prefiguring, what do Orwell and others tell us about our fears of the future? from Comment

• Barely into its adolescence, the term "political correctness" is already a gratingly "familiar piece of moral shorthand," Roger Kimball wrote recently in The National Interest. Martin Amis said PC aspires to "accelerate evolution," but Kimball is less impressed. He sees it as no less than a tool of "moral conformity" and what Tocqueville called "democratic despotism." PC is so humorless that it functions as "a kind of geiger counter that registers deviations from the norm of earnestness," Kimball writes. Essay While his political science digressions are interesting (if not convincingly relevant), and while it is fun to ridicule PC professors who condemn Frosty the Snowman for "substantiat[ing] an ideology upholding a gendered spatial/social system," Kimball could have spent less time harping on academics and more on this question: What are the noble principles behind the grotesqueries of PC, and how can they be salvaged from PCers? Or, to use Kimball's own terms, how can the "abstract benevolence" of PC be extracted from the "rigid moralism"?
• The world is getting ready for a once-in-a-lifetime astronomy event. Actually, twice-in-a-lifetime. On June 8, Venus will appear to slide across the face of the sun in what is called a transit of Venus. This mini-eclipse hasn't happened since 1882 (when it helped scientists hone their calculations of Earth's distance from the sun), and after an encore in 2012, it won't happen again until 2117. Venus will appear as a black dot on the bottom half of the sun, causing a .01% drop in the sun's brightness, said a cover story of the New York Times Science section. But don't look at it directly.

Related: Pollution causes global dimming, from the Times

• Miscellaneous: Dordt College's Pro Rege posts back issues—Newsweek's cover story on the Left Behind series - Proofreading the Bible, from the Associated Press –Why oil prices are up, from the London Guardian—The good and bad news from Sudan, from The Week magazine, and what the U.S. is doing about it, from the New York Times - European voter apathy, from the Guardian—TV turns to animation for adults, from the Christian Science Monitor—The triumph of the knuckleball, from the New Yorker

• Previous/Archive/About/Feedback/Links/CT blog

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant atBooks & Culture. He writes the weekly "On Language" column for the Chicago Tribune.