- Reared on self-esteem and impervious to guilt, the next generation needs good news that can break through their defenses.
Scot McKnight posted 9/14/2009
Emerging adults (those between 18 and 30) form a generation that is largely insensitive to the potency of God's holiness, and are therefore insensitive to the magnificence of his grace, the shocking nature of his love, and that gratitude forms the core of the Christian life.
Issues arising
-Never has a generation been more in tune with the self and more protective of the self.
- Sesame Street focused on "We are all okay."
-Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street are early examples of the self-esteem movement
Twenge is a professor of sociology at San Diego State University, and her research method has been to study the history of answers to standard personality tests over the last 50 years.
... This sentence summarizes her assessment of iGens: "The individual has always come first, and feeling good about yourself has always been a primary virtue."
One of the most insightful elements of Mann's book is whether iGens feel guilt. For a person to feel guilty, that person must have a sense of morality. But morality requires a potent sense of what is right and wrong, and it needs a powerful sense of what is true and false. Contemporary culture does not provide the average iGen with a profound grasp of what is right and wrong apart from the conviction that assaulting the self is clearly wrong.
But her faith wasn't vibrant or all-consuming until she went to Central America, saw the needy of this world, and realized that Jesus' kingdom vision was bigger than her personal happiness.
