Every once in a while, I see a news item that reminds me that cohort identities and generational shifts still matter, despite how much the notion of “generation” has been reworked in my own mind since I first wrote a book about my own, over a decade ago. I noticed in the New York Times yesterday a review, by Seth Schiesel, of a tour that marries musical performance to video games. This is a phenomenon we’ve quite briefly registered here earlier when discussing the importance for everyday musical (and thus, never far behind, theological) life of video game platforms as creating spaces for musically imaginative, as well as capitalistically managed, practices. In the article, Tommy Tallarico, the co-creator (with Jack Wall) of “Video Games Live,”unrolls an observation already evident in the kinds of music and films being made today, and likely to be relevant for the next several decades: “I’m 41 years old, and we’re the first generation to grow up with video games and computers and MTV and the Internet. And just because we turned 40, we didn’t stop playing video games, and now we’re having children and in the next 20 years we’ll be becoming grandparents, and then we’ll be all through the culture.”

My (yes, so-called) generation, those of us born in the mid-to-late 60s through 1980 or so, and finding our bearings as kids and adolescents during the 70s and 80s, has known for some time that we are a relatively smaller group sandwiched between two mammoth generations. It is interesting to consider the way in which it falls to us to hold together — insofar as we want to speak to a broad segment of our culture — the spiritualities and secular music practices of the Baby Boomers, on the one hand, who are now up to 20 years our senior, and the Millennials on the other, who are now up to 20 years our junior. There is now an interesting three-generation circuit of faith and culture in which the immersion in popular culture practices, and the crisis of religious institutions, and the quest for a liveable spirituality, are all more or less taken for granted. Will we be able to speak of a distinctive contribution to the history of theology, at least in the West, from my generation?

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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