It's a Flat World After All
Glocalization: How Followers of Christ Engage the New Flat Earth book review.
Reviewed by Mark Buchanan
April 1, 2007
I live in a small Canadian town, on a cul-de-sac with four homes. One of my neighbors is from Tanzania. Her father is a pastor, and her mother is a Muslim. Her Canadian husband lives most of the year in the Congo and speaks with an Afrikaner accent though he's never lived in South Africa. In another house lives a young couple. He was born in Canada, she is a second generation Pakistani. In the third home is a middle-aged couple with three children. She was born in Canada, and he to a native Canadian father and a first-generation Indian mother. Their children mix these genes in exotic combinations. A stone's throw from us is a Sikh Temple and three Coast Salish Native Big Houses. And I don't live in a city. It's a small town with an economy based on logging. Yet the world lives here. This is the world Bob Roberts Jr. sets out to describe in Glocalization: How Followers of Christ Engage the New Flat Earth. Today, cultures blend and intersect with an ever-quickening intensity and intricacy. Technology, particularly the internet, and affordable travel are leveling the ground between one part of the earth and another. The world is now simultaneously local and global, tribal and cosmopolitan. Edward Lorenz famously said that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Texas. In the new flat earth, that hurricane now affects everyone's business. In Glocalization, Roberts first sets out to describe this new world and provide a rationale for why the church should engage it. He synthesizes a great deal of complex cultural and historical information in short order, and the result is a hodgepodge of broad assertions. There are other books that tackle this material more faithfully, but it is the second section where the ...
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