Teenagers are a piece of work, didn’t you know? They are shallow, self-absorbed little beasts who eat their parents’ food, snicker at old ladies, and drop out of school every nine seconds. They break into grandpa’s liquor cabinet and sell drugs out of their ninth grade backpacks in the bathroom behind the baseball field. Teens destroy things. They sometimes torture cats. 

If this is what you think of young adults, come hang out with me for a few days. I see things differently.

It might help to know why I care so much. I started living in Teen Land at age thirteen, and never really left. I went from high school, then to college, and right back to high school having earned a secondary teaching credential at the tender age of 21. Since then, I’ve taught public high school in the rural Ozark Mountains of Missouri, the material world of Orange County, and a middle class suburb of California’s Central Valley. Twenty-five years later, I’ve earned the right to love them. 

This week the NYTimes posted an article about the impending demise of the traditional university. According to columnist Thomas L. Friedman, “massive open online courses” (MOOC) are the future,. The article cites how millions of students are now taking coursework once reserved for a handful of privileged elites. Students stifled by autism, remote locations, lack of funds, social awkwardness, or snob-deficit can now jump on the college degree train. The brick-and-mortar campus, speculates Friedman, should be already preparing its fossil record in advance of its extinction.

The now-legendary Kahn Academy looks downright rustic compared to the MOOC movement. Advocates say that the skeptics will eventually join the ranks of past naysayers who were also suspicious of the printing press, commercial flight, or the Roomba. All people deserve an education, one that can lift them from poverty and bring them into the modern world, say all the innovators, so step aside and let the revolutionaries do their magic.  

After an acrimonious standoff between Hostess executives and the bakery labor union, our worst apocalyptic fears might be realized: Twinkies might disappear forever. Eighty-three years of children’s lunchboxes and Texas Fair fryers might not be enough to rescue the golden little fella from spongecake oblivion. 

But just because Twinkies have always been around isn’t reason enough to keep them there. Nostalgia shouldn’t hijack common sense. 

The church has had its own share of bad products which, like the the Twinkie, have been unhealthy, strangely enjoyable, and made on the cheap. I say it’s time to retire all those evangelical products that made us so happy at the time. Here’s a start:

• Children’s flannel boards with all those Caucasian Bible characters
• Pyramid-shaped photo arrangements of church staff (pastor on top, with his wing men in dark suits in descending order according to seminary degrees and paychecks)
• Padded, mauve sky-box chairs
• The badly-proofed collection of typed praise songs with the plastic curlicue binding
• Round, plasticized communion wafers
• The dual-handled pouch-bag-offering-thingie (passed down the aisle with choreographed wonder)
• My Texas pastor’s clear plexiglass pulpit with the laser-cut cross cutout
• The 3-D silver dove for my bumper
• Big screens that disappear into the big slit in the ceiling
• Hand-made banners with silk tassels
• Powerpoint slideshows (golden wheat stalks blowing? Multi-racial families smiling? Clouds billowing?)
• Black electric keyboards from Wal-Mart with pre-set beats “for the young people”
• Four Words: Bob. Tomato. Larry. Cucumber

I like doing more than having.  Anti-consumerism just seems right to me. To be a lover of God and humanity more than a lover of things, to be a Christ follower who chooses abstracts like love and peace over crass commercial objects--this world view feels, to me, like a soft blanket I just discovered in my closet. On most days Henry David Thoreau feels legit. 

But my house is full of those same crass objects I claim to dislike. I bought a new messenger bag the other day when I already have two, and I was certain that the made-in-China wooden bird I bought for my kitchen table would make my house feel, you know, more bohemian. The capitalists who have custom-built their jacked-up mansions along the bluffs outside my city have also bankrolled dozens of charities and helped pay my salary as a public school teacher. In short, the paradoxes of capitalism are keeping me up at night, especially in an election year. To make things worse, most of the Christians I know don't see the paradoxes at all. 

Democracy is so outdated. If we Americans can customize our laptops, our dream homes, our low rider trucks, and our pizza toppings, we can surely come up with a way to manufacture a custom-made President.

Choosing one candidate to represent the dreams, idiosyncrasies, causes, beliefs, and common sense of 300 million people doesn’t make any sense at all. I mean, doesn’t Washington realize that we have a very specific list of demands?

So I submit a new idea, inspired by those geniuses at Apple: iLeader.  It would fit beautifully with the American ethos of individuality and self-absorption. This impressive gadget—still several years away from a workable prototype—would allow us to be governed by a flawless, personalized platform of ideals. Call it anarchy without all the depressing chaos.

Paradoxes are so cool these days, they’re hot. We’re reading more these days just as we’re reading less. The underground rock band Gotye is mainstream. Less clothing apparently gives women more power. I demand to know what else is upside down. 

Oh, and there’s one more thing: the Christian faith--made up of countless public followers of Jesus Christ working as one body for thousands of years--has also been made the most private. 

Since when?

In the past ten years, the growing consensus is that “faith is a highly personal matter.” In  particular, we are told to keep radical Christian beliefs tucked away. Sexual closets have been flung open, and serious followers of Jesus have been asked to get inside instead. University campuses may accept private faith as authentic, but public faith is flogged in the intellectual town square. Faith is good to have around for some things, like yoga or kindness to strangers, but rather worthless when it comes to intellectual vigor. 

I need to re-post this reminder of how to keep summer from slipping into nothing much at all. 

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The American summer is a child’s season.

It is not designed, it seems, for grownups who associate the smell of sunscreen with skin cancer prevention, or worry about watermelon seeds falling on the carpet. Perhaps our educational system sets the rhythm of our bodies at the time we enter kindergarten, where children, like Pavlov’s dogs, follow their conditional reflexes right to the swimming pool every June 1^st. The impulse to earn A’s or do chores for mother gets squashed like so many blades of grass crushed under the Slip-n-slide.

I thought I was a grownup, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve been a public school teacher for a long time now, and except for the four years preceding kindergarten (when life is one continuous recess), I’ve never missed a summer vacation. But there’s a familiar paradox that hits me right about now every year when my mind and body prepares for the summer shift. Man is not designed for extended vacations, despite what my childish heart years for. The more discretionary time we have, the less we get done. The longer the Honeymoon package to Maui, the more we yearn for home. The more late nights we option, the fewer meaningful hours we have left in the day.

My daughter isn’t really the one graduating. It’s actually me. 

My other degrees suddenly seem cheap, just small-time tokens of my own ambition. But the one I’m earning this month? It’s the big one--the one from a preparatory school known for the hardest tests on the planet and the highest number of credits. It’s the diploma that I never really thought about eighteen years ago when I enrolled at 12:17 a.m. at St. Agnes Hospital on the sixth floor, Maternity Ward B. 

The other mothers and I whisper about it quietly in between the graduation parties and awards nights. None of us knows quite what to do, even the ones who have two or three of these honors behind them. It’s not because we lost the graduation instructions, but because for us, it’s the season of loss. Diplomas are supposed to get you somewhere. They’re supposed to launch you into another galaxy of opportunity. But this new honor I’m earning seems, at least for now, to be taking everything away from me, just as it’s giving my daughter everything I prayed for. 

When you first read this title, did you see a verb or a noun? If you’re younger than forty,  chances are the second word in my title is a verb. 

Sex rules. 

In this grammatical reading, Sex rules our movies, our conversations, and more than ever, our politics. It rules the way we frame relationships. Sex rules advertising, novels, fashion, comedy, and ballot boxes. Increasingly, it influences the way we think about the world. To most young people, sexual orientation is as natural a genetic marker as your height or eye color. Sexual health depends on freedom of choice, with few forbidden territories. Sex rules culture more than ever before. 

If you were born before 1970, you might have seen a plural noun in my title. When it comes to sex, there are rules. With this interpretation, sex rules prevent a culture from losing its dignity, and they give society a fixed moral compass. Without rules, sex is shameful, destructive. To traditionalists, sex with rules makes it better, not worse. In this grammatical reading, my title anticipates a list--not an observation. 

In literature and mythology, Shape Shifters are deceptive characters who cross boundaries at will, moving between worlds to confuse the sacred and the profane. Sometimes a character even finds its shape changed by someone else through a curse or spell. The transformation may or may not be voluntary. 

And so goes the tragic story of Trayvon Martin, the newest Shape Shifter in a long history of American journalism. 

In this world, some things are pure and innocent while other things are evil. Racism and bigotry are transcendent evils, while defending the innocent is universally just. But Trayvon’s tragic death--and its chaotic aftermath--teaches us that perception is often a Shape Shifter. Under the spell of one version, Trayvon teaches us that trigger-happy racial profilers are alive and well. Under the spell of another version, Trayvon teaches us that young black men often contribute to their own violent downfall.