Heroism, Hospitality, and Holiness: Generational Perspectives on the Church-World Relationship

Abstract

IT IS PERILOUS—and presumptuous—to speak as a representative of a generation. Although born in 1970 and having watched an inordinate amount of MTV growing up, I am not a typical Generation X-er in terms of faith as described by Tom Beaudoin in his book Virtual Faith, 2 particularly in the Gen-X preference for personal "spirituality" over institutional "religion." And, although everyone under thirty or forty may seem alike to those older, I am increasingly struck by the ever-greater differences between my students and me: born in the early to mid-1980s, they have no memory, for example, of Ronald Reagan or even the Gulf War, much as I am completely incompetent when it comes to Web page design and instant messaging. Moreover, although I am young, my Catholicism is largely old and thick. I grew up in the novelist Alice McDermott's country—Queens and Nassau Counties, New York—a dense, urban Catholicism, where my all-boys high school classmates identified themselves by parish, and immigrant culture and employment still endured; my high school lost nearly twenty graduates on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center, many of whom [End Page 45] were city firefighters. The geographic rootlessness, parish-shopping, suspicion of institutions, and fragmented families so characteristic today are not my experiences.