With Change like THIS, perhaps there IS Hope:

(***courtesy of Gary Varvel)

There may still be hope for the upcoming generation… Below are two articles VERY much worth examining, each of which backs-up the sentiment so clearly expressed in the cartoon.

The first one’s by Michael Barone and is from several weeks back. However, it’s just as pertinent today as it was then, I promise:

Immature Americans = “Cheap Patriotism”

The more I think about the notion that an entire culture has succumbed to the allure of youth, and trapped itself in immaturity, the more troubled I become. Once upon a time, I thought the cult of youth was just the worship of the body beautiful–lithe, smooth-skinned young flesh–and a corresponding fear of aging and death.  But I fear the truth is far more insidious.  The more we become a “visual” culture, the more easily we fall into this trap of juvenilization…the hypnotic draw of TV, video, computer, and ‘Droid have sucked us in.  We read less, we react more.  We ponder less, we play more.  We don’t reflect, we just “like” reflexively.

We blame it all on being busy…we don’t have time to read something substantial. Give me the news briefs, please. Give me the short sentences, the pithy paragraphs, the headlines.  Read a book?  Well…maybe on Kindle, where I can keep pausing to play Angry Birds.

But our appetite for sound bites seems to leave us empty of deep thought while forever hungry for more hot air.   I could spend a lot of time researching and reporting to you what I think is at the root of this cultural phenomenon.

But it doesn’t matter.

Follow up re: “Young People are Stupid”…it’s worse than we think

Thanks to a Facebook friend for providing the link to an excellent and sobering article in this month’s Christianity Today.

It’s not just that our youthcentric culture ignores the fact that youth are stupid (as JTR wrote yesterday), and seems oblivious that pandering to youth’s massive ego is ultimately self-destructive.  The ugly truth is that we have ALL, by and large, been “juvenilized.”  Huntington University professor Thomas Bergler’s lengthy, excellent article (adapted from his book, The Juvenilization of American Christianity) diagnoses the state of the Church in America in four words–and I believe that those same four words describe a huge problem in America at large:  “We’re all adolescents now.”

Here’s a bit of background on how Bergler sees the changing face of evangelicalism:

THIS JUST IN: ‘Young people are Stupid…’

Listen up, gang: when you can get polar-opposites such as Craig Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg to agree on ANY subject, everyone should probably pay a bit of attention…

Both men (one a Scottish liberal comedian; the other an American conservative syndicated columnist/author) are bizarrely in synch on this single, inarguable fact: young folks, by virtue of their youth, simply don’t know much. They certainly don’t know a fraction of what they will later on, when they’ve vastly more life experience. So why in the world does society give youth so much credence?

Let’s give a listen to Ferguson’s explanation first: