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[A potpourri of cultural observations, thoughts & trends]

SMOOTH, REAL SMOOTH
Mark Kingwell, a philosophy teacher at the University of Toronto, during a recent address to students at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design:

“The world of our everyday experience is filled with smooth objects, perhaps more so now than ever. The dominant aesthetic in everything from running shoes to monumental architecture is the flowing curve and the slick surface, the inviting mound and the bright hue. Increasingly the world is crowded with blobs: blobby fur niture, blobby cars, blobby buildings. Modernism’s glass and steel boxes have given way to the warmer, more inviting surfaces and textures of the nursery. We are witnessing a sort of infantilization of the postmodern integration.

	Evangelism and Social Action—Out of Balance on Campus? “[Regarding the balance between evangelism and social action,] I dare say that we are a long way from where we should be. In most campus ministries, a student leader who is sleeping around will be confronted with that sin pretty quickly. And the same holds for a student who doesn’t believe in prayer or who isn’t regularly having a quiet time. But I doubt that we spend nearly the same amount of time confronting our students who are not concerned about the poor, who do not weep over the evening news. Our praise and worship certainly doesn’t approach these themes as much as the Bible does!” —Byron Borger, owner of Hearts & Minds books and associate staff with Coalition for Christian Outreach, in an interview with the Ivy Jungle Report, Spring 2000.

Cutting edge running shoes now resemble socks or sheaths that fit over the foot, eliminating all trace of their functionality. Cars are built not for speed but for lovability. . . . Everybody loves baby-smooth skin, most people appreciate a smoothly-turned phrase. Smoothness signals comfort, ease, respite from the hard or the challenging. . . . Speed may be the dominate trope of the age, but easy speed, unhurried velocity, is even better: it is the essence of cool.”

—Harper’s Magazine, July 2000.

Good news:
You're a sinner!
“Sin is the best news there is. . . . Because with sin there’s a way out. . . . You can’t repent of confusion or psychological flaws inflicted by your parents—you’re stuck with them. But you can repent of sin. Sin and repentance are the only grounds for hope and joy, the grounds for reconciled, joyful relationships.”

—John Alexander in The Other Side, quoted in Context, March 1, 2000.

Not all lambs and rainbows
“It does no good to protect ourselves with inflatable bits of comfort and advice,” says writer Barbara Brown Taylor in The Other Side.

	Over-wired? About 10 percent of college students use the Internet to the jeopardy of their academic careers. Students classified as Internet-dependent admit they have skipped meals and classes, lost sleep and missed appointments so they can spend more time on the computer. Many try to prevent others from knowing how much time they spend on the Internet. —Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute study.

“Judgment, violence, rejection, death—these are present in our world and there is some crazy kind of consolation in the fact that they are present in the Bible as well. They remind us that the Bible is not all lambs and rainbows. If it were, it would not be our book. Our book has everything in it—wonder and terror, worst fears and best hopes—both for ourselves and our relationship with God.”

—Quoted in Context, July 15, 2000.

Rest of the Story
“How do we in our high-technology society achieve [the Sabbath rest] the Bible describes for farmers, shepherds and tree-keepers? . . . What do we mean by time for restful self-reflection? Do we mean turning away from community and society into individualistic fantasies and the mass media—or into a rhythm that society itself could breathe in, a rhythm that would breathe society? . . .

One key is to shape coalitions among groups that now see each other as alien or hostile. The well-off and the poor both suffer from being driven into overwork, so [perhaps] they can work together to end it.

“Neighborhood congregations, unions, businesses, and other local groups could agree to proclaim ‘Days of Renewal and Celebration’ from Friday through Monday of a given week—a ‘free time’ weekend. They could arrange neighborhood festivals and town meetings during the four days—share music, crafts and stories with each other. . . .

“When religious communities enter struggles for justice in society, we sometimes forget that justice in the biblical context has a deep root in spiritual calm. The jubilee passage of the Bible (Leviticus 25) calls for more radical justice than any other passage, yet it never uses the word ‘justice’ (‘tzedek’) in its outcry. Instead it calls for ‘shmitah’ and ‘dror’ and ‘Shabbat Shabbaton’—words that mean release, pause, non-attachment—Sabbath within Sabbath, an exponential Sabbath.”

—Rabbi Arthur Waskow, in Sojourners, May–June 2000.

Global Warming? No Problem!
Russell Seitz of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies points out that “when a greenhouse gets too steamy, you just whitewash it. That reflects the heat of the sun and keeps the greenhouse cooler. So why not whitewash the earth to counteract the ‘greenhouse effect’?

“The real problem is the earth’s low albedo—it reflects only a small portion of the sun’s energy because most of its surface is dark compared to a snowfield or a coat of white paint.” Seitz claims that if 250,000 square miles of the earth could be painted white, that would be enough to keep in check the earth’s tendency to warm up.

If you split the task among everyone on earth, “brightening up 250,000 square miles is not such a formidable task: it comes to about 1,000 square feet apiece.” So, where would we paint the planet? “It would take centuries to exhaust the supply of treeless badlands,” says Seitz, or “we could lighten up the hundreds of thousands of square miles of roofs and roadways that already exist.”

—Forbes, August 21, 2000.

Yes! Yes! Yes!
“When you look at America today, you see a country awash with saying yes. There is a famous statement that comes from the French student revolt of 1968 when French students scribbled on walls, ‘It is forbidden to forbid.’ That is the situation in America, awash with all sorts of people saying yes to the weird. The taboos no longer are in place. America has lost the capacity to say no to evil, and that is a very dangerous place to be.”

—Writer and scholar Os Guinness, quoted in Current Thoughts & Trends, June 2000.

Go directly to jail
Students at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the U. of Maryland can get an unusual dose of reality learning: in one class they visit white-collar criminals in prison. “My goal is to bring ethics into the classroom,” says UM faculty member Stephen Loeb. “I wanted to find something the students would find interesting and memorable.” Students have met with several people, ranging from a man serving 21 months for mail fraud to a former head of a large non-profit organization who is serving 41 months for embezzling almost $2.5 million.

—Adapted from National On-Campus Report, June 15, 2000.