Young People Unite?

I just stumbled upon this video touting a new “movement” called, Generation We.

I find it fairly compelling–particularly the message about our environment, which calls to my mind our Youth Group’s Watershed Service Project. But I also think that it’s at times a bit creepy–in the way that it seems to encourage a kind of group-think.

What do you think? Post a comment!

The “New Atheism,” cont’d. (comments??)

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, has recently announced a plan to write a book about how Harry Potter and other fantastical stories popular among young people–including those that can be found in the Bible–may be “pernicious” and have a “negative effect on children,” since they are “anti-scientific.”

Some warn that attacking Harry Potter, fairy tales and other fantasy stories sounds an awful lot like religious fundamentalism. But Dawkins insists that children should be trained to “always look at the evidence,” and so his book will examine various mythical accounts of life and compare them to scientific accounts. And as Dawkins puts it, only the scientific ones are “substantiated.” (Check out Bede’s Blog’s earlier post on Dawkins and others here.)

All this brings to mind something that came up during our Seekers Dinner discussion of science and religion last week. Just like Harry Potter and Bible stories, as well as all myths and fairy tales, the plays of Shakespeare, and the novels of Mark Twain or Virginia Woolf are not “substantiated” either. Indeed, much of the writing of Shakespeare, Twain and Woolf is quite fantastical. That’s why we stock Shakespeare, Twain and Woolf in the “Fiction” sections of libraries and book stores. Yet I think that most people, whether they believe in a Judeo-Christian conception of God or not, whether they are hard-core scientific thinkers or not, find a lot of Truth (with a capital “T”) in such un-substantiated fiction. Might the same thing hold for the fantastical stories found in the Bible and elsewhere?

(This is only kind of a rhetorical question- Please post a comment! Don’t be shy! Or if you must be shy, post a comment using an alias…)

Victoria Requiem at Bede’s this Saturday

As part of the Arts at St. Bede’s series, the St. Bede’s choir will team up with the choir from Christ Church, Portola Valley, at 7 pm, this Saturday, November 1st, to perform the 1605 masterpiece, Officium Defunctorum, by Tomás Luis de Victoria–otherwise known as the Victoria Requiem. Written to commemorate the death of the Dowager Empress Maria of Spain, this intensely passionate six-part work is one of the finest of the Renaissance era and not to be missed, particularly as part of a Eucharistic liturgy. Take a minute and listen to this clip right now:

Our own Jane McDougle will be conducting together with Matthew Burt of Christ Church.