RE: CONTINUITY
My friend and pastoral colleague, Sean Meade, takes issue with my assessment of the "paradigm shift":

...However, the international perspective actually supports the paradigm shift theory, in part. It at least brings a valuable observation. Multiculturalism and globalism are part of the world worldview in ways they have never been before. Add to that the export of USAmerican pop culture (much of which is bad and harmful) and I see a new, emerging global reality. Time is 'speeding' up. The pace of change is accelerating. The amount of person hours available for the cranking out of scientific and cultural developments is expanding rapidly.

I certainly don't deny that there are major changes in process and that the impact is far reaching. My contention, though, is that we tend to overstate change at the expense of continuity. In our culture we so emphasize change that we don't see how much is also staying the same. And I suspect that there is a bit of cultural arrogance in it because it empowers each new generation to believe that they are in a better place than all previous generations and that they much therefore reinvent the culture and all of its institutions. I've heard the "paradigm shift" rhetoric throughout my entire 47 years (albeit each generation uses different terminology to describe the phenomena).

Again, I am in no way denying that we're in the midst of some major changes -- including globalization and multiculturalism. And I believe that "we ain't seen nothin' yet" in those areas. But I also believe that modernism started to unravel years ago and that what we're seeing today is merely the next stage in this unraveling. On a philosophical level we have replaced modernism with a sort of happy-nihilism. On a practical level we're just taking a few more steps down the road to life being defined exclusively in consumeristic terms. And as Sean points out, we're getting pretty good at exporting these values.

All I'm asking is that we approach the current changes with a little more humility and a little less hype about our own place in history.