Technology Happens Fall 1996

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American Protestants spend a great deal of their time chasing trends that are just passing over the horizon, so let's hope that this is the last Christian book on "Generation X." When Douglas Coupland's Generation X was published in 1991, it struck a chord with the second generation of suburbia, facing economic stagnation in the Boomers' shadow. But then 1995 hit, Netscape's 23-year-old co-founder Marc Andreessen became a multi-millionaire, and suddenly Xers were masters of the Web, the hottest economic property of the '90s, while the Boomers struggled to catch up. Meanwhile, Coupland himself had repudiated the idea of "Generation X" after he was flooded by calls from corporations wanting his expertise in (you guessed it) marketing to Xers. Add the oncoming Millennial Generation (Generation Y?) and the eclipse of Nirvana by Hootie and the Blowfish, and "Gen X" as Zeitgeist started losing momentum. Kevin Ford's book catches the last good wave.

But another reason to hope that Jesus for a New Generation is the last book of its kind is simply that Ford does a great job, and it's hard to imagine anyone improving on it. His book, born out of Leighton Ford Ministries' and InterVarsity's consultation on evangelizing Generation X in 1993, does a masterful job of introducing non-Xers to the influences that have shaped this generation: family chaos, omnipresent media and technology, blurring standards of morality, and the subtle but pervasive influence of postmodernism. Born in 1965, Ford is on the edge between Boomer and Buster, but he clearly knows how to listen. He spent hundreds of hours preparing for this book by meeting with Xers one-on-one and in focus groups, and their voices speak authentically in its pages.

While most of the ...

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