Weekly Recap January 13

Well, the holidays are over and I'm back from my trip to New York, so it is time to get back to my normal routine. I apologize for not posting more over the past few weeks, but the majority of my reading over the past few weeks was pure fun (I highly recommend The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns).

But here are some of the articles that I found interesting over the past few weeks:

Leonard Sweet will be writing a series of articles on "The Top Ten Paradoxes That Will Rule the Future" over at Next-Wave Ezine. In this month's article, he lists the 10 paradoxes that he will explore in the next few months. They are:

1) Do little large.
2) To move up, move down.
3) Learn to fail so you can succeed.
4) Your only control is in being out of control.
5) It's more important to know what you don't know than what you know.
6) The more you think out-of-the-box, the more you need well-built boxes to think.
7) A graying globe requires greening.
8) Only locavores can globalize.
9) When fast replaces vast, go slowly with the holy.
10) Moore's Law makes Murphy's Law all the more relevant.

Over at Out of Ur, there is an interesting reflection on being a young pastor that begins with a very provocative title, Disarming the Boomers, and statement:

Let’s be honest. The distance between the Boomers and Busters isn’t just a generation gap—it’s a generation gorge. The cultural, technological, and philosophical shifts that have occurred in recent decades have given these two generations fundamentally different perspectives. Although some younger pastors have abandoned the Boomer church to launch their own communities, there are many struggling to serve side by side with the older generation.

Over at Emergent Village, Shawn Landres of Synagogue 3000 (a Jewish group with similiar goals to Emergent Village) on what Jewish reformers can learn from the Emerging Church Movement and the questions that yet remain to be answered concerning the movement.

And the Alban Institute has a great article that summarizes the seven elements of worship that characterize Christian worship regardless of style. This is a great baseline for evaluating what we do in worship.

Of course, the biggest news in generational issues over the past few weeks has been the record number of younger voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and their impact on the elections. A side issue has been the generation gap among women voters with older feminists voting for Clinton and younger ones leaning toward Obama. The whole issue came alive for me as I stood in line for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and listened to a trio of twenty-somethings discuss the election. They obviously were leaning toward Obama but my favorite commment came when one of them declared, "I'm not voting for the old Southern white guy--what's his name? Edwards? Yeah, that's him!" (And I thought Edwards was a young Southern white guy--at least compared to Huckabee, Bush, et. al.)