Generation to Generation

Abstract

tion, many were shocked and dismayed by the vulgar anatomical comments of sixty-seven-year-old Jesse Jackson directed at forty-seven-year-old candidate Barack Obama. Perhaps even more startling was the retort made by forty-threeyear-old congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.: “I’m deeply outraged and disappointed in Rev. Jackson’s reckless statements about Sen. Barack Obama. His divisive and demeaning comments about the presumptive Democratic nominee—and I believe the next president of the United States—contradict his inspiring and courageous career.”1 Whatever else was going on in these painfully public exchanges among Chicago’s most prominent African-American figures, a reprise of the earlier clash between Obama and pastor Jeremiah Wright, clearly we saw evidence of an unmistakable generational divide within the national leadership of the black community. Having myself come of age in the 1960s, in which the term “generation gap” was apparently coined (“Don’t trust anyone over thirty”), I now have more sympathy, perhaps sentimentally so, for the senior Jesse Jacksons of this world, having recently joined them in the growing ranks of America’s sexagenarians. Whenever I get off the Manhattan PATH train in Hoboken, New Jersey, trailing all the twentyand thirty-somethings surging up the stairs and out the exits after their day on Wall Street, I feel I must be the oldest person in sight, if not in town. “Just wait,” my eighty-one-year-old father quipped. “When you’re my age, everybody looks young!” While we sometimes complain that the venerable discipline of theology also runs after the latest and newest version of this or that in an effort to remain “with it,” this may not be so much the pursuit of the trendy as it is a sign of one generation’s preoccupations succeeding another’s. In 1963, five years before Theology Today Editorial