What’s more important
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007I thought I’d post a link about religion and teens and the state of the union. It’s a pretty interesting article reviewing a book about how teens reflect our society contrary to popular opinion. The book talks about other things, too.
Smith and Denton’s most significant contribution to our understanding of American teenagers’ religious and spiritual lives begins when the authors attempt to explain why teens believe what they believe — in a sense, why they are so conventional.
The book brings up this idea of “theraputic individualism”, which is what really grabbed my attention.
“Therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings.” And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy.
However, I’ve decided what’s more important is this book of poems by Mary Oliver that I’ve been reading. Here is a poem by Oliver from that same book.
The Snowshoe Hare
The fox
is so quiet–
he moves like a red rain–
even when his
shoulders tense and then
snuggle down for an instant
against the ground
and the perfect
gate of his teeth
slams shut
there is nothing
you can hear
but the cold creek moving
over the dark pebbles
and across the field
and into the rest of the world–
and even when you find
in the morning
the feathery
scuffs of fur
of the vanished
snowshoe hare
tangled
on the pale spires
of the broken flowers
of the lost summer–
fluttering a little
but only
like the lapping threads
of the wind itself–
there is still
nothing that you can hear
but the cold creek moving
over the old pebbles
and across the field and into
another year.
