Steven Cromack

“Selfie” is the 2013 word of the year. In many ways, its definition encapsulates the identity of the generation that made it their own. The Millennials are rising. It is important that our teachers, school
administrators, and college professors understand the students who sit before them in their classrooms. Of course, no generation is uniform. Based on the data, however, many Millennials members agree on certain ideas.

Born between 1982 and 2003, we Millennials grew up in a rapidly changing world, and we were—and are—able to capture every moment of it through MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vine. We are called “the Peter Pan” and “Me Generation.” We live by social media and have made it a part of every moment of our lives. According to our elders, we are rude because we cannot look up from our phones; lazy; refuse to grow up; and play too many video games. The Baby Boomers despise our attitudes and insist that because of us the country is going to hell in a hand basket. Our teachers claim that we are a generation of idiots falling behind the rest of the world because of our ability to “txt” and write in single letters—idk—and lament that words like “selfie,” “clutch,” “gucci,” and “swag” have become part of everyday vocabulary.

There are indicators, however, that we just may be the next great generation. In their book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation Neil Howe and William Strauss outline the unique characteristics of the rising age group. Millennials, they claim, are “unlike any other youth generation in living memory. They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse . . . and destined to dominate the twenty-first century like today’s fading and ennobled G.I. generation dominated the twentieth” (4-5).

Of all the generations before us, we are the most tolerant and accepting. In a 2005 study 60% of respondents between the ages 15 and 25 agreed with the statement “homosexuality is a way of life and should be accepted by society.” In comparison, of those over 57 surveyed, only 39% agreed with that statement. In a 2002 study 60% of Millennials surveyed believed that “immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” In comparison, only 42% of those over 57 agreed with that statement. Many within our generation are independents with liberal inclinations, especially on social and economic issues. With that said, we overwhelmingly loathe the government and want nothing to do with it.

That does not make us selfish, however. On the contrary, we are actually more selfless than the Baby Boomers. Forty-three percent (and rising) of our generation is committed to community service, something within our control. We believe that our future does not lie with the government, but with ourselves.

As one Millennial blogger puts it: “We have been handed the world and it looks awful, and we have never felt so goddamn powerless . . . . The self is the only thing we have. Our own experience is the only thing on which we have complete authority, the only thing over which we have total control.”

Sixteen percent of our generation is unemployed because 58% of managers won't hire us. In the meantime, we are going to live life, and if it means doing so from our parents’ basement, then so be it. Indeed, we have invented the acronym YOLO, or “you only live once.” #noregrets.

Emperor Constantine who made the day about “Christ’s mass.”
In addition to drunken debauchery, the Romans numbed the pain of inequality by forcing themselves to give gifts. Drinking, noise, games, caroling, and giving gifts are all part of the Christmas tradition.

Steven Cromack

The study of antiquity in American schools is superficial, lackluster, and in a state of asphyxia. State curriculum frameworks have all but stripped the histories of ancient Greece and Rome of depth, meaning,

Ancient bust of Seneca.

and relevancy. Ancient Greece was more than the origin of democracy, more than a group of city-states, and stood for more than a mythology. Rome was not just an empire, and it offered the world more than the concept of a senate. At the heart of these cultures was the idea that life is a verb, something that humans must do; something they must will into their world.

Greek democracy failed miserably. The other city-states quivered under the threat of Athens and her oppressive empire. Furthermore, the Greeks often envisaged humans caught in a double-bind, ensnared in webs of conflicting moral obligations between their relations and the meddling gods. As a result, the Greeks thought themselves to be better off dead than living. “For man the best thing is never to be born, never to look upon the sun’s rays,” bemoaned Theognis of Megara. “That the best thing for a man is not to be born, and if already born, to die as soon as possible,” bewailed Silenus.
 
Rome was about more than a great capital city and gladiators. By the end of the republic, Romans desperately yearned for hope and meaning. The tyrants Caesar and Pompey battled not for honor and virtue, but for total control of the government. The Romans’ society was falling apart right before their eyes. Everything they believed in was slowly disappearing. “The whole scene is changed,” Cicero wailed, “as though for me the sun has fallen out of the sky.” Even more disconcerting was the idea that maybe this chaos was their fault. “[Rome] is crucified by conscience, tormented by shame,” decried Flaccus.

And yet, out of the misery and despair came life itself. The Greeks and the Romans offered ways to make life worth living. Through his teacher Socrates, Plato argued that aletheia, or the higher truth, was worth pursuing. When a person finds this deeper truth, she finds fulfillment because in knowing this truth she understands completeness and meaning. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle declared that the deep joy that comes from knowing thyself and becoming an active citizen in society, i.e., happiness, makes life worth living. Plato’s aletheia and Aristotle’s happiness, however, only come from actions—search, deduce, pursue, and contribute.

Romans insisted that humans live by the philosophies of either Stoicism or Epicureanism. The Stoics rejected the senses, put mind over matter, and as a result felt no pain. To an Epicurean, the highest good is pleasure.  It is best to enjoy the moment, and put one’s problems aside. Everyone is going to die no matter what and so carpe diem—seize the day; “seize” being a verb. 

Read the Greeks and the Romans. Pursue life and truth. At some point in our lives, we are all captives of despair. But, as the Roman poet Seneca reminds us in his Troades, “Let us live. For captives this suffices.”

Miniature of Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th at Cockington Green.

Steven Cromack

Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980)—both more than thirty years old—are now America’s classic horror movies. Why do they enjoy such prominence in American culture? The answer rests in the content of their plots and the context in which they were produced. 

John Carpenter’s Halloween catapulted the slasher film into American culture with its release in 1978. In 1974, before he made A Christmas Story, director Bob Clark made Black Christmas, a story of young adults alone in a secluded area, ready to be terrorized, an all but standard plot line in horror movies today. But Halloween’s central character Michael Myers was something new. He was not just a serial killer, but one who stalked his victims with creepy music in the background. And he was seemingly indestructible. Never before had such a character existed in cinema. Not too long after Halloween came Friday the 13th, another movie about an indestructible evil being that slaughters all in its path.

On a deeper level, these films perhaps resonated with the psyches of Americans who lived through the 1970s, America’s “long national nightmare” and its “crisis of confidence.”  It was the era of uncertainty, a time of stagflation, the transformation of social institutions and mores, and the Vietnam War. Americans learned from the Pentagon Papers that their government had lied to them. The cinema of the 1970s reflected this cynicism and despair. It is not a coincidence that this was the era of The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), and Jaws (1975). The disaster films of the 1970s offered viewers the thrill and spectacle of normal life upended along with the relief of escape and survival. America’s mood during the 1970s guaranteed the popularity of Halloween. Following in the footsteps of Michael Myers came Jason and then Freddy Krueger. The list of slasher films since Halloween is extensive, and these movies have become a regular part of America’s Halloween culture.

Steven Cromack

Contrary to popular belief, Jackie Robinson was not the first black man to play major league baseball. That title belongs to Moses Fleetwood Walker, who lived and played nearly eighty years before
Robinson. Walker’s story is fascinating not only because of his baseball stardom, but also because an all white jury acquitted him of first-degree murder in 1891.

Historians do not know much about his early years. Moses Fleetwood Walker was born in Ohio. A minister’s son, he entered Oberlin College and planned to become a lawyer. While at school, however, it became clear that his passion lay elsewhere. Instead of going to class, Walker played baseball, and in 1883 he landed a spot in the minor leagues as a catcher with newly formed Toledo Blue Stockings. As a player, he impressed the press and the fans. Sporting Life, the nation’s largest sport publication at the time, wrote on September 15, 1883: “Walker, the colored catcher of the Toledos, is a favorite wherever he goes. He does brilliant work in a modest, unassuming way.” In 1884 Toledo joined the major competitor to the National League, the American Association. As a result, Walker earned his title as the first black player in the major leagues.

Unfortunately for Walker, tension between his teammates, unrelenting jeers from fans, and an injury led to his release. He bounced around the minors for a while, eventually ending his career in Syracuse. In 1891, upon leaving a bar in that city one afternoon, Walker encountered a group of white men, one of whom threw a rock at him, while the rest surrounded him. In a panic, Walker stabbed the closest man. He was indicted for first-degree murder. Amazingly, the all white jury found him not guilty.

Walker spent the rest of his life writing a treatise advocating the return of black Americans to Africa. He died of pneumonia in 1924 and until 1996 lay in an unmarked grave. America was not ready for Walker. C. Vann Woodward wrote in his Strange Career of Jim Crow that America in the 1880s was: "The twilight zone that lies between living memory and written history . . . . It was a time of experiment, testing, and uncertainty—quite different from the time of repression and rigid uniformity that was to come toward the end of the century. Alternatives were still open and real choices had to be made."

Instead of embracing integration, baseball’s managers drew the color line and Walker was forgotten. It was not until the 1980s when historians uncovered Walker’s story. For further reading, see David Zang’s Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball’s First Black Major Leaguer.

Steven Cromack

I just completed teaching a unit on the Gilded Age. Information wise, the Gilded Age can be soporific—railroads, oil, Stalwarts, Mugwumps, and Half-breeds. Who cares, especially if you are 16 and have just gotten your learner’s permit? Instead of teaching content, therefore, I decided to teach concepts. I took a risk, and, as a result, a classroom experiment that could have gone horribly awry not only intrigued students, but also forced them to reflect on their roles as citizens and to face their own sense of morality.

At the heart of the Gilded Age was the question of wealth. What, if anything, do the rich owe society? I began one class by having students choose a card from a prearranged deck stacked with twos, threes, and fours and four kings. I then gave each student the number of Hershey kisses on their card. The kings, however, got “King Size” Kit Kats. There was outrage. I immediately had the students write and reflect. How did it feel to have the wealth of the classroom concentrated in the hands of a few? Their answers included discussions of fairness, chance, and justice. These were the themes discussed and debated during the Gilded Age by the Populists, millions of immigrants, the wealthy, and Theodore Roosevelt.

Homework assignments forced students to reflect on deep philosophical questions: make them squirm and think. Here is one example :

Is it just that you live in a house, apartment, or condominium while another lives in a refugee camp? Is it just that you have food in excess while others are starving? If there is indeed injustice in the world, who is responsible for its rectification? 

One can use Jacob Riis to teach empathy, Michael Moore to teach muckraking, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to teach happiness, and the abuse and personal strength of Julia Ward Howe to hook students as to why history really, really, really matters. In the end, all of the content humanized history.

These assignments and classroom topics were unlike anything students had experienced before. Their reflections of the unit and its content were overwhelmingly positive—they liked concepts versus facts and dates. For the students, this approach was far more useful. Here is what one of them wrote:

“I feel it is only this year that I’ve realized the importance of our past in connection to our future. Though I have been attending public school for eleven years now, Mr. Cromack is the first teacher to start dissecting terms such as: injustice, fairness, citizen, and responsibility. The discussions are rigorous, the class engaging, and the material is suddenly compelling.”

Steven Cromack

What was life like for those living during the time of Martin Luther? Is Western Civilization on the eve of another Reformation? Modern society certainly indicates, at the very least, that people are speaking up and speaking out.

In the United Kingdom a rapidly increasing number of people are flocking to the “emerging churches.” Led by people like Peter Rollins (How [Not] to Speak of God) and other renegade pastors, these “churches” meet in bars, at skate parks, and other profane places. The theology of the emerging church takes a postmodern approach to Christianity and conceives that institutional churches have lost the true meaning of the Christian faith because people are too focused on following prescribed, meaningless rituals. Instead, emerging Christians sit together and read the Gospels and talk about Jesus the Christ.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, scholars, theologians, journalists, and ordinary people are launching their own assault on mainstream Christian practices. In his 2011 controversial book Love Wins Rob Bell indicts “traditional” Christianity on the charge of using the concept of Hell as a means of social control. Accept Jesus, or you go to Hell. Complete this Christian checklist, or you go to Hell. Go to church, or burn in Hell. This notion, Bell argues, runs counter to the crux of Christianity, which is that love wins because God’s love is infinitely more expansive than the box in which we place it, along with Heaven, Hell, and our own narrow conception of God. Bell goes even further to say that Hell will be empty because God’s grace extends into Hell itself.

Theologians from many of the divinity schools have entered the fray. In her book Almost Christian Kenda Creasy Dean, a theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, argues that teenagers practice a “mutant form” of faith called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” and that conventional American churches and their members are responsible for its cultivation. “After two and a half centuries of shacking up with ‘the American Dream,’” Dean writes, “churches have perfected a dicey codependence between consumer-driven therapeutic individualism and religious pragmatism. These theological proxies gnaw, termite-like, at our identity as the Body of Christ, eroding our ability to recognize that Jesus’ life of self-giving love directly challenges the American gospel of self-fulfillment and self-actualization.”

Andrew Sullivan published an article in Newsweek entitled “Christianity in Crisis.” In it he argues that Christianity has been destroyed by modern culture and the American Dream. He urges Christians to embrace Jesus, not American, get-rich evangelism. People’s priorities have become mixed up, Sullivan asserts: fundamentalist Christians support the torture of terror suspects and oppose homosexuality and abortion despite the fact that Jesus said nothing about these matters.

In 2012, Ross Douthat came out with Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, in which he writes that “America’s problem isn’t too much religion, or too little of it. It’s bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place.” Indeed, Joel Osteen, the mega-church pastor who insists that God wants you to be happy, healthy, and rich has published a new book awkwardly entitled Everyday a Friday.
 
In many ways, religion has become a dirty word. People now take “religion” to mean organized Christian churches--along with their scandals, hypocrisy, and backward and fading traditions.  In 1999 a Gallup survey asked Americans “Do you consider yourself spiritual or religious?” 54% responded that they were “religious but not spiritual.” By 2009 only 9% of Americans affirmed such a statement.

Is Western Civilization overdue for another reformation? 

Steven Cromack