“[O]ur youth-obsessed society in fact wages war against the youth it presumably worships. It may appear as if the world now belongs mostly to the younger generations, with their idiosyncratic mindsets and technological gadgetry, yet in truth, the age as a whole, whether wittingly or not, deprives the young of what youth needs most if it hopes to flourish. It deprives them of idleness, shelter, and solitude, which are the generative sources of identity formation, not to mention the creative imagination. It deprives them of spontaneity, wonder, and the freedom to fail. It deprives them of the ability to form images with their eyes closed, hence to think beyond the sorcery of the movie, television, or computer screen. It deprives them of an expansive and embodied relation to nature, without which a sense of connection to the universe is impossible and life remains essentially meaningless. It deprives them of continuity with the past, whose future they will soon be called on to forge.
“We do not promote the cause of youth when we infantilize rather than educate desire, and then capitalize on its bad infinity; nor when we shatter the relative stability of the world, on which cultural identity depends; nor when we oblige the young to inhabit a present without historical depth or density. The greatest blessing a society can confer on its young is to turn them into the heirs, rather than the orphans, of history. It is also the greatest blessing a society can confer on itself, for heirs rejuvenate the heritage by creatively renewing its legacies. Orphans, by contrast, relate to the past as an alien, unapproachable continent—if they relate to it at all. Our age seems intent on turning the world as a whole into an orphanage, for reasons that no one . . . truly understands.”
—from Robert Pogue Harrison’s Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
Links to posts and programs featuring Richard DeClue:
- Juvenescence: Robert Pogue Harrison on Cultural Age — Robert Pogue Harrison argues that Western culture is on the cusp of a new mode of civilization that can either result in a rejuvenation of the legacies of the past or in their juvenilization, the latter of which would lead to a loss of cultural memory and the infantilization of desires. (47 minutes)
- Youth Culture & the Church — Mardi Keyes explains how modern assumptions about adolescence differ from a biblical understanding of human development, and Mark DeVries discusses family-based youth ministry. (74 minutes)
- Recovering the meaning of “faith” — Andrew Root asserts that a Church co-opted by the ethics of "authenticity" has lost its ability to speak of the transcendent and its understanding of what it means to be in Christ. (18 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 68 — FEATURED GUESTS: Murray Milner, Jr., Steven C. Vryhof, Douglas J. Schuurman, Robert Gagnon, Richard Stivers, and Quentin Schultze
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 129 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Nicholas Carr, Robert Pogue Harrison, R. J. Snell, Norman Wirzba, Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski, and Peter Phillips
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 115 — FEATURED GUESTS: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Andrew Davison, Adrian Pabst, Gary Colledge, Linda Lewis, and Thomas Bergler
- David Martin on what happened in the 1960s — David Martin talks about how the cultural shifts of the 1960s were the fruition of previous changes in the 1890s and 1930s. (17 minutes)
Links to posts and programs featuring Brady Stiller:
- Juvenescence: Robert Pogue Harrison on Cultural Age — Robert Pogue Harrison argues that Western culture is on the cusp of a new mode of civilization that can either result in a rejuvenation of the legacies of the past or in their juvenilization, the latter of which would lead to a loss of cultural memory and the infantilization of desires. (47 minutes)
- Youth Culture & the Church — Mardi Keyes explains how modern assumptions about adolescence differ from a biblical understanding of human development, and Mark DeVries discusses family-based youth ministry. (74 minutes)
- Recovering the meaning of “faith” — Andrew Root asserts that a Church co-opted by the ethics of "authenticity" has lost its ability to speak of the transcendent and its understanding of what it means to be in Christ. (18 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 68 — FEATURED GUESTS: Murray Milner, Jr., Steven C. Vryhof, Douglas J. Schuurman, Robert Gagnon, Richard Stivers, and Quentin Schultze
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 129 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Nicholas Carr, Robert Pogue Harrison, R. J. Snell, Norman Wirzba, Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski, and Peter Phillips
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 115 — FEATURED GUESTS: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Andrew Davison, Adrian Pabst, Gary Colledge, Linda Lewis, and Thomas Bergler
- David Martin on what happened in the 1960s — David Martin talks about how the cultural shifts of the 1960s were the fruition of previous changes in the 1890s and 1930s. (17 minutes)
