Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Regenerating re:generation quarterly
Much-loved when it was still publishing, and much-missed when it stopped, re:generation quarterly is back—at least in the archives of Christianity Today’s Library (which requires paid subscription). Provocative, intelligent, and creative, the journal’s eight years of articles are well worth a read the second (or first) time around. CT’s Ted Olsen introduces the new holdings.
Here are some excerpts:
Small Worldview
by Read Mercer Schuchardt
The fairy tale world, as Bruno Bettelheim explains it inThe Uses of Enchantment, consists of caricatured stereotypes of good and evil that fight it out in the context of archetypes organic to the culture that created them. The chief characteristic of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale is the fact of real danger, real consequences, and the death or loss of limbs, children, or parents. The old fairy tales were Grimm and ghoulish precisely to the degree that real life was terrifying. Disney’s fairy tales, by contrast, have progressively moved in a direction that confirms the child’s suspicion that adults have no memory of what it was like to actually be a child. ...
In a childlike world, everything is huge and terrifying, full of mystery and wonder. In a childish world, all adults act as selfishly and ruthlessly as children in the schoolyard. Disney cartoons have come to envision magical worlds where there is no real fear, no delayed gratification, no real problems beyond misunderstandings, with stories whose resolutions create no hard feelings*in short, a world without gravity, as free and meaningless as a world without consequences.
Class Dismissed
by Lauren Winner
One of the great American myths is that we are a classless society. It’s not true, of course; we have always had classes, though the republican ideology of the Founding Fathers imagined that America, unlike Europe, would never have a class of permanent wage-earners. At first, we didn’t. We had slaves and middling yeomen, but not a proletariat. As nineteenth-century America embraced capitalism, it became clear that a working-class was to be a permanent feature in the life of our nation. Still, many Americans never learned to think, or talk, about class politics.
While many Christians, for example, beat our collective breast and worry about owning too many cashmere sweaters, and may even fork over a few extra dollars to the offering plate when we feel especially guilty, we never quite make the jump from talking about money to talking about class. And criticize capitalism? Only when we’re slumming with liberation theologians.
Our very vocabulary for talking about class, organized around that vague and elusive term “middle-class,” is inadequate.
The Violence of Evangelism
by Andy Crouch
Let the record show that, like right-thinking people everywhere, we at re:generation quarterly have been alarmed by recent rumors of people being “beaten over the head with the Bible.” We do not endorse, condone, or tolerate the use of the Bible as a blunt instrument. We are shocked at the thought of unwilling converts cowering in Christian churches all over the land, in fear of further beatings-about-the-head by their proselytizing Christian neighbors. These assaults must stop at once.
Furthermore, given the unmistakable overtones of violence that accompany the loud thumping of the Bible, whether with one’s hand or upon a nearby table or pulpit, we urge all Christians to immediately cease being Bible thumpers. Become Bible wavers, or, better still, simply leave your Bibles at home, preferably secured with child-protective locks.
Now it’s true that no one I know has actually seen someone being literally beaten over the head with the Bible. But bring up the topic of evangelism, among Christians or non-Christians, and it will not be long before this dire scenario is invoked and heads solemnly nod in dismay.
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