Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Value for Pursuing a Ministry to Empty Nesters!
Review: Baby Boomers have hit the empty nest stage of their lives with a bang! For decades marketers and ministers have tried to understand how to reach out to Baby Boomers. With the advent of the empty nest stage of the lives of Boomers where often they function as a sandwich generation between aging parents and their children who are struggling to be adults, another great opportunity has presented itself. Therefore, as one who feels that congregations and parachurch ministries need to include intentional ministry to persons in the empty nest stage of their adult lives, I find this book to be valuable.

This book charts the emergence of five subcultures of Boomers: dogmatists, Born-again Christians, mainstream believers, metaphysical believers and seekers, and secularists. The value of this book is in its ability to provide you with an understanding of these five subcultures that is not based on shallow, pop research, but on in-depth suveys and interviews over a ten-year period.

One of the changes going on in Baby Boomers connections with congregations is that long-term loyal adults are dropping out when they become empty nesters, and those who left during their twenties and have not yet come back to a congregational community are now coming back as empty nesters. However, those who are coming back often find that congregations are not looking for them. They are looking for young adults, single adults, and senior adults.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Value for Pursuing a Ministry to Empty Nesters!
Review: Baby Boomers have hit the empty nest stage of their lives with a bang! For decades marketers and ministers have tried to understand how to reach out to Baby Boomers. With the advent of the empty nest stage of the lives of Boomers where often they function as a sandwich generation between aging parents and their children who are struggling to be adults, another great opportunity has presented itself. Therefore, as one who feels that congregations and parachurch ministries need to include intentional ministry to persons in the empty nest stage of their adult lives, I find this book to be valuable.

This book charts the emergence of five subcultures of Boomers: dogmatists, Born-again Christians, mainstream believers, metaphysical believers and seekers, and secularists. The value of this book is in its ability to provide you with an understanding of these five subcultures that is not based on shallow, pop research, but on in-depth suveys and interviews over a ten-year period.

One of the changes going on in Baby Boomers connections with congregations is that long-term loyal adults are dropping out when they become empty nesters, and those who left during their twenties and have not yet come back to a congregational community are now coming back as empty nesters. However, those who are coming back often find that congregations are not looking for them. They are looking for young adults, single adults, and senior adults.

Rating:
Summary: The Long Arm of God.
Review: Best and most lasting is knowing one has embraced faith. Roof's message is not new. Humanity has a long history of time spent on the elusive "quest" -- that long (and continuous) trail ever treading toward spirituality. A fulfilling goal. Yes I would recommend "Spiritual Marketplace." As an aside I will share a few personal observations. A friend and his friend, an older gentleman known locally as the 'Hermit of Cold River,'were both skeptical of all man's institutions. They eventually turned to a life time of living in the wilds of the earth's oldest mountain range, the Adirondacks, almost a century ago. There they found meaning in their life and discovered their greatest joys. I recommend reading LIFE WITH NOAH. A narrative of joy, a story of rediscovering one's values. Between pages of survival and adventure living in the outdoors one is treated with some beautiful prose. Backpacking pilgrimages have been taken into the Cold River valley just to capture God's grace and a fraction of the inner peace these men found among nature.

Rating:
Summary: extremely valuable for understanding academic broo-ha-ha
Review: The only kind of people who write books like this are shimmering, yet unconscious social incidiae who attempt to control others by painting themselves, their mentations, and their 'research' as some-sort-of-sacred by pursuing the 'sociology' of something like religion.

The sociology of religion should be regarded a bit more often with the same sort of sidelong glance as was given to 'political economy' in past centuries. A healthy mistrust is often a useful weapon in such cases.

This is the kind of fashionably spoken drivel, laced with selected 'facts,' sanctioned by much of academia, espoused by those who ultimately regard others as gullible lesser versions of themselves. The perceptive will look beneath the surface. Roof's liberalism doesn't run as far and deep as he imagines it does. It also doesn't cover the fact that people aren't just automotons of measurable 'religiosity.' They can have deep and sincere human feelings that affect all areas of life, not just the superficial 'religiosity' by which Roof seems to entirely assess others, and whereby he tries to measure and negotiate his pain. ( A sociologist is prone to ask 'what's wrong with those people?' rather than looking to see what might be wrong with himself.)

Roof takes his imagined self-importance, plays his games of influence, and ventures to control the thinking of the weak-minded, both inside and outside academic circles, via his writings and occasional public appearances. Such people know how to buddy up to power of all kinds, and walk all over those people who may be more legitimate, at least for a time. (There may be those who have more to offer to the world via deep, thoughtful sincerity, rather than than the type of 'sincerity' which Roof pretends that he has.)

Such individuals will turn those close to them, even friends and family, into sorts of subservient terrors to protect themselves from the world, after a fashion. They may not really admire or love him, but they are in awe of his influence, publications, tv and magazine appearances, etc. They do not do his 'bidding' directly, but they become his automatic and robotic bulwark against a dimension of the world he so neurotically mistrusts.

I will not harp on what those who know, have to say about the generalites of the hegemony or ethos of Santa Barbra, where he now teaches. Readers can unearth that for themselves, and blend it into their understanding of Roof and his ilk.

In truth, Roof's liberalism and his appreciation of people's religiosity is a disguised version of the negative types of Republicanism which he imagines he despises ( see also his other writings.) There is, ultimately, nothing to distinguish Roof's transparent rhetoric from that of some variety of masked, 'well-fed right-wingism.' This is so, in spite of any feigned 'love me, I'm a liberal' presentation to the contrary.

...yes: see his other writings, also. I give this book five stars for what it has to reveal to the perceptive. It has much to say about pseudo-intellectual broo-ha-ha to those who refuse to accept such rhetoric at face value.

Don't take my word for it. Read him with both eyes open, for yourself. Some of the articles he writes for beliefnet.com can be very enlightening to those who know how to see through such gossamer pyrotechnics. Roof is, ultimately, an uncomfortable and paranoid man who cannot somehow bring himself to understand the world and its humanity in any deeper sense. He is baffled. His rhetoric is like the kind of petty-influence monger who resorts to 'power elite' ploys of one type and another. He attempts to buffer and cushion himself socially, professionally, and politically. He reacts by spending much of his time offering a kind of 'documented' pseudo-information which masks human, not necessarily overtly religious, factors. This fully amounts to leading many of the gullible and unperceptive down a flowery path.

And then he may have to start the cycle all over again, by reaching upwards into the conservative establishment he pretends largely not to be a part of, to protect himself.

A thoughtless, frightened, and negative form of liberalism informs and contaminates his writings - and is likely to poison his readers.

Go ahead - read between the lines ... Roof is not a cult: he is more part of a sanctioned 'liberal academic' sub-cult. The enemy isn't Roof, necessarily. It is the warped social perspective that he is a part of. He earns a dubious place in this movement, by helping to perpetuate it.

It must have been a great effort for his editors to excise the more paranoid rhetoric from his writngs. It would be no use to have one of their dollar-makers to be regarded as more fit for psychiatric observation.

For Roof, as other reviewers have here indicated, coming to know spirituality as well as he affects to understand organized religion and its individualized 'religiosities,'would be great medicine for this sociologist. Otherwise, he and his readers will tend to remained mired. The necessary technicalities of research often overpower judgment. Added to the resulting confusion is a tentative/fearful conformance to prevailing political and social hegemonies of 'every breeze that blows,' by which we often destroy the soul.

It is too bad that people like Roof leave the rest of us the difficult job of growing up, and going beyond actual surfaces. There are those who must 'take up the slack,' so to speak, as Roof winds his merry, if dubious, path. It would be nice if the misunderstood, yet deeply sincere, could gather a little help.

A smiling appearance of being socially obliged and well-meaning, doesn't always reverse this effect. The pseudo-democratic gathering and corralling of a long list of 'religiosities' does not restore needed faith and respect for human souls who are truly spiritual, considerate, and feign little or nothing in their attempt to be an element of sincerity in this world. External, tabulatable rosters derived from 'research' do not measure true human spirits. People can have hearts, not just categories. People can have deep meaning, not just fashion.

Roof would do well to open up to such souls, if only for his own sake.

Rating:
Summary: Both Deep and Wide
Review: This book both informed and affirmed something inside me. By calling the book the spiritual marketplace instead of the religious marketplace, the author immediately reveals the issues for a generation raised on modernity, but which nonetheless knows when it is spiritually hungry. It is almosts too simplistic to equate spirituality with inner experience and religion to outward beliefs, but it's good for a starter. The search culture seems to opt for community based on common inner experience rather than on "truth once revealed". A case in point is a cohort of "born again" boomers whose inner experience draws them into fellowship, but whose modern views shock the old guard who still equate spiritual fullfillment with a proper set of beliefs. Roof's findings make me cheer for the human spirit, the compass of which will always point north when distractions are out of the way. By listening to the stories and the data in Roof's book, I feel more hope that we really CAN find our way home.

Rating:
Summary: Both Deep and Wide
Review: This book both informed and affirmed something inside me. By calling the book the spiritual marketplace instead of the religious marketplace, the author immediately reveals the issues for a generation raised on modernity, but which nonetheless knows when it is spiritually hungry. It is almosts too simplistic to equate spirituality with inner experience and religion to outward beliefs, but it's good for a starter. The search culture seems to opt for community based on common inner experience rather than on "truth once revealed". A case in point is a cohort of "born again" boomers whose inner experience draws them into fellowship, but whose modern views shock the old guard who still equate spiritual fullfillment with a proper set of beliefs. Roof's findings make me cheer for the human spirit, the compass of which will always point north when distractions are out of the way. By listening to the stories and the data in Roof's book, I feel more hope that we really CAN find our way home.