Slate on Christian Young Adult Novels
Though evangelical books have had a hand in creating this more moral era, the larger takeaway from the Christian books is not that girls should imagine themselves as subservient wives, but that they should prepare themselves for adulthood. Certainly heroine Candace Thompson sees marriage as her ultimate goal when she is choosing a boyfriend. But she also wants someone “who valued what she did, would take her seriously, would help her grow as a person, and would love and respect her.” That’s not a girl preparing for a life as a doormat; it’s a girl learning about the importance of emotional strength. It’s a girl who refuses to settle for a so-so boy who is not on track to be a good man. As far as girlish escapism goes, it’s better than holding out for a Prada purse.
The Omega Male: Now An Animated Feature
Remember the Omega Male coverage in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate that I pointed to this week? The thing is, by the time a topic gets to the point of being commented on in mainstream media it is already pervasive. What seemed like timely cultural commentary on what looks like a far-reaching issue looks fatally late after coming across this story about a new animated feature for kids, Alpha and Omega.
From the Slate post:
It’s about a boy wolf and a girl wolf who get relocated by well-meaning park rangers thousands of miles from home and have to find their way back. On the journey, the usual adventure and romance ensues. The twist: SHE is the alpha and HE is the omega.
From the movie’s synopsis:
Quick-witted Humphrey (voice of Justin Long) likes to frolic with friends and play video games with squirrels; disciplined Kate (voice of Hayden Panettiere) likes to call the shots and hunt caribou. Normally, an omega wolf like Humphrey would never stand a chance with an alpha wolf like Kate, but when they’re both transported halfway across the country they must work together to get back to their natural habitat.
Sidenote: was this Dennis Hopper’s last movie?
These two came this week and I can’t wait to start them after I’m done with the Bonhoeffer bio. Then again, chances are I’ll take an early peek…
Why You Should Become Familiar With The Term “Omega Male”
He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. - Hanna Rosin
There has been significant attention in the media recently about changing roles between men and women; most notably in The Atlantic, Slate, and the New York Times.(Interestingly each written by women) One of the major themes in the trend that the articles point out is the rise of two things: The Omega Male and women who don’t need them.
The entire article in the Atlantic is worth a read, but I wanted to highlight a few paragraphs I thought were especially insightful.
“As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”
“American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man.[Emphasis mine] “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”
“At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood, home to the 50-something producer with a starlet on his arm. Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore have boy toys, and Aaron Johnson, the 19-year-old star of Kick-Ass, is a proud boy toy for a woman 24 years his senior. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently wrote that the cougar phenomenon is beginning to look like it’s not about desperate women at all but about “desperate young American men who are latching on to an older woman who’s a good earner.”
Here’s the thing; you might be this guy. You might know one, or ten, of these guys. The Omega Male is not a phenomenon; which is why we need to familiar with it and them.
The Complications of Roles
This is clearly a loaded subject; packed with a slew of issues like the following:
- Sociological: the well documented prolonging of adolescence into emerging adulthood.
- Philosophical: according to the New York Times article, questions of self-understanding.
- Pop-Cultural: as the references in each article to movie and TV characters illustrate, the media that helped to create this phenomenon is selling it back to us and perpetuating it. I could’ve sworn there was a line in Fight Club about this.
- Economic: are cultures without America’s vast economic luxury facing the same cultural issues? Are Belize, Rwanda, or Ecuador struggling with the same confusions?
The end result of all of it is wide-spread confusion over the roles of men and women, love and sex, relationship and friendship.
The Omega Male and the Church
What none of these articles have touched on is how this has invaded and effected the church. Like any other social entity, the church tends to overemphasize certain things to the detriment of others. Beneath the din of culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage, we have to ask if the church been faithful in teaching young people about proper roles for men and women. In large segments of the church that clumsily “embraced the arts” in the last 7 years, did they spend as much time teaching those same artists what the Bible teaches about what a man is, what a woman is, and how they should interact in friendships and relationships?
The Omega Male and the gender roles confusion associated with them are only recently being popularly analyzed and diagnosed, but by the time issues reach a popular level they are already ubiquitous. This would make it a good time for the church to ask how it can teach Omega Males to be men; to contend for the faith (Jude 3), to treat girls as sisters (1 Tim. 5:2), and to work hard like a farmer, sharing in suffering, competing by the rules like an athlete (2 Tim. 2:1-6) - all activities that Omega’s aren’t prone to do but about which the Bible is clear.
For further thought-provoking commentary on men, women, & relationships, I strongly suggest this video.
Dave Eggers On Why Americans Are Adverse To Soccer
Our continued indifference to the sport worshiped around the world can be easily explained in two parts. First, as a nation of loony but determined inventors, we prefer things we thought of ourselves. The most popular sports in America are those we conceived and developed on our own: football, baseball, basketball. If we can claim at least part of the credit for something, as with tennis or the radio, we are willing to be passively interested. But we did not invent soccer, and so we are suspicious of it.
The second and greatest, by far, obstacle to the popularity of the World Cup, and of professional soccer in general, is the element of flopping. Americans may generally be arrogant, but there is one stance I … stand behind, and that is the intense loathing of penalty-fakers. There are few examples of American sports where flopping is part of the game, much less accepted as such. Things are too complicated and dangerous in football to do much faking. Baseball? It’s not possible, really—you can’t fake getting hit by a baseball, and it’s impossible to fake catching one. The only one of the big three sports that has a flop factor is basketball, where players can and do occasionally exaggerate a foul against them, but get this: The biggest flopper in the NBA is not an American at all. He’s Argentinian! (Manu Ginobili, a phony to end all phonies, but otherwise a very good player.)
But flopping in soccer is a problem. Flopping is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating, and these four behaviors make for an unappealing mix. The sheer theatricality of flopping is distasteful, as is the slow-motion way the chicanery unfolds. First there will be some incidental contact, and then there will be a long moment—enough to allow you to go and wash the car and return—after the contact and before the flopper decides to flop. When you’ve returned from washing the car and around the time you’re making yourself a mini-bagel grilled cheese, the flopper will be leaping forward, his mouth Munch-wide and oval, bracing himself for contact with the earth beneath him. But this is just the beginning. Go and do the grocery shopping and perhaps open a new money-market account at the bank, and when you return, our flopper will still be on the ground, holding his shin, his head thrown back in mock-agony. It’s disgusting, all of it, particularly because, just as all of this fakery takes a good deal of time and melodrama to put over, the next step is so fast that special cameras are needed to capture it. Once the referees have decided either to issue a penalty or not to our Fakey McChumpland, he will jump up, suddenly and spectacularly uninjured—excelsior!—and will kick the ball over to his teammate and move on.
From Slate.
Local Fox News Story on Mars Hill iPhone App
Who is that bearded nerd they interviewed? [Video & Article Here]
Missional: Is it a good word?
Reflection & Influence
Christians love catch-phrases and keywords. Making fun of or lamenting “Christianese” or the Christian subculture is a relatively easy and lazy thing to do. The more fruitful approach - the one that would hopefully build up the church rather than armchair quarterback it - is to lovingly critique it.
How we use language is something that really interests me. It’s something that’s important to see and think about because, while I’m not a linguist, I can see that language carries with it two big factors. First, language is a reflection of what we think, believe, and value. Secondly, language influences what we think, believe, and value.
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Blurred Definitions
Which brings me to the word I want to bring up in this blog article: missional. “Being missional” or “to be missional” has been a descriptive or imperative catch phrase for about the last five years, particularly among younger Emerging churches. It’s a word that I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable with because of it’s relative ambiguity (but that’s another article).
A recent Q&A video from John Piper helped me see more clearly the restlessness I felt about the word. In this clip he makes a very good distinction between “evangelism” and “missions”.
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Cause & Effect?
I’m left with a couple questions:
1) Do churches and Christians use the word “missional” because they are afraid of the word “evangelism”?
2) Though it claims to do otherwise, will this North American emphasis on being “missional” negatively effect global missions and the global Church by affirming (instead of challenging) our culture’s narcissism and producing culturally insular Christians?
