Summary: <p>Millennials - how can the evangelical church embrace and encourage the dreams of post-moderns who don't fit the past social and faith frameworks of past generations? Will the church take its place as an influencer of this emerging generation?</p><p><a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1A3CFUWiA6sRn4_4da_QTyYm9KQx7Gl97eViCdakjKgI/viewform" title="Enter to win one of five copies of The Post-Church Christian by Paul &amp; Carson Nyquist...and see what you think about the differences in generations and how we should approach those differences." target="_blank">Enter to win one of five copies of <em>The Post-Church Christian</em> by Paul & Carson Nyquist...and see what you think about the differences in generations and how we should approach those differences.</a></p><div id="showNotes"> <h2>Girls Talk</h2> <p>by Katelyn Beaty</p> <p>There's a spate of new television shows with the word girl in the title—even though the girls in view are all decidedly over age 21. There's New Girl, the Fox comedy where doe-eyed Zooey Deschanel plays a klutzy teacher living with three guys, a Three's Company for the 21st century. There's the Bravo reality show Gallery Girls, a vapid and catty look at seven young women clamoring their way into the art scene of New York City. And 2 Broke Girls is like the all-female counterpart to Two and a Half Men—a raunchy half-hour comedy about men ogling women's breasts, but see, it's written by women instead of men. Ah, the sweet liberation we've waited for.</p> <p>Though they differ in tone, these new shows share a common thread: They focus on unmarried women (or girls, if we must) in their 20s and 30s trying to land a career, and a meaningful way to live, in a time of tricky economic realities for many young Americans, and of choices previously unknown for women. That is also the theme of the smartest and most divisive show of them all, the 2012 HBO series Girls.</p> <p>Written and directed by 26-year-old Lena Dunham (with help from executive producer Judd Apatow), Girls follows the postcollege travails of Hannah Horvath (also played by Dunham), an aspiring writer culling material for her forthcoming memoir, four chapters of which are written—"the rest I kind of have to live," she tells her concerned parents in the pilot episode. Guided by a mantra of feeling and experiencing everything she can, she's busy "trying to become who I am"—either obnoxiously self-centered or simply too introspective for her own good, depending on whom you ask.</p> <p>Hannah, her three girlfriends, and their boyfriends and lovers live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a place where NYU grads can open a business that will take your normal-sized ties and turn them into skinny ones (this is true), and where the population of young, wealthy 30-year-olds has doubled since 2000. It's a place of well-camouflaged privilege: Hannah and company lack secure jobs, hopping from unpaid internship to barista gig. Yet somehow they pay the rent, party, and wear stylish if awkward ensembles, trendy in a disheveled way—which neatly sums up Hannah's whole way of life.</p> <p>Girls is a fitting title, then, because it portrays four women teetering on the verge of adulthood, not knowing which way they will or should fall. The coming-of-age story is an old faithful, and Girls follows in this sturdy tradition. What's new about the show is that these women, like many real-life ones, are working from a rough script. The lines that signal "womanhood" are absent, coming later or not at all, or look quite different from the lines our mothers followed.</p> <div><a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/april/girls-talk.html" title="Continue reading at Christianity Today..." target="_blank">Continue reading at Christianity Today...</a></div> <h2>Additional Resources</h2> <p><a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2143001,00.html" title="Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation" target="_blank">Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation</a> - TIME Magazine's Joel Stein examines the Millennial generation and our views of them.</p> <p><a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/" title="Her.Meneutics" target="_blank">Her.Meneutics</a> - A Christianity Today blog written by women talking about cultural issues founded by Katelyn Beaty.</p> <p><a href="http://www.moodyradio.org/brd_ProgramDetail.aspx?id=103598" title="Unrequited Love" target="_blank">Unrequited Love</a> - A past <em>Bring To Mind</em> podcast where Melinda talks with Dr. Laura Smit about unrequited love, especially as the topics of marriage and relationships relates to millennials.</p> </div>
