Danielle Shroyer

Today’s Moltmann Monday comes to us courtesy of Theology Ryan Gosling:

I do, too, Ryan. I do too.

Dallasites, my friend David Martin and I are hosting a one-day conference this coming Saturday called CARE. David is a Hospice Chaplain with years of experience and he has done extensive continuing education on grief. I’m excited about this opportunity for people across the metroplex to come and hear him share his wisdom. If there is someone in your life who is aging or ill, if you or someone you know is struggling with the process of grief, this is an opportunity not only to hear the wisdom David has to share, but to come and be equipped with practical tools on how to visit people in the home or hospital, how to support those who are ill or grieving, and how to encounter your own grieving process. I will also share briefly on how we can support those loved ones struggling with Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s a fruitful way to spend a few hours of your Saturday. Spread the word!

Saturday, April 21

9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

13154 Coit Road Suite 104

Dallas, TX 75240

Cost for the workshop is $20/person or $30/couple.

To register for Care, please send an email with your name and phone number to dgshroyer (at) gmail (dot) come.

Here’s something crazy for your Friday afternoon. My hubbie told me about this article and I seriously thought he was kidding at first. But apparently, it’s true. From NPR:

Michigan State University surveyed more than 700 employers seeking to hire recent college graduates. Nearly one-third said parents had submitted resumes on their child’s behalf, some without even informing the child. One-quarter reported hearing from parents urging the employer to hire their son or daughter for a position. Four percent of respondents reported that a parent actually showed up for the candidate’s job interview.

In case that didn’t sink in: FOUR PERCENT of parents WENT TO THE INTERVIEW–the ADULT JOB INTERVIEW–with their child. As in, they got dressed and accompanied their 20+ year old to an office building and proceeded to sit across the desk from a potential employer and next to their grown adult child.

The study did not say whether the parents in this scenario answered the interview questions, but I can just imagine they may have added an extra tidbit or two at the end of each sentence.

I’m beyond baffled.

Have a good weekend!

Look, I know this is not about theology, or Moltmann, or the church, or even parenting. So feel free to abstain from reading my rant-y post.

On Friday, I read The Hunger Games on the flight home. On Saturday, I bought the next two books in the series and finished them over the weekend. Clearly, I found the story compelling. And certainly, I appreciated the escape into a different kind of world…even if that world was confronting all the same problems that haunt us here (power, violence) in ways that were often grotesque. Maybe another day I’ll blab on about what I thought about the actual content of The Hunger Games. However I have a much bigger concern that could not help but creep up over and over as I read these pages: why is teen fiction worse than children’s fiction? How can that possibly be?!

If you don’t believe me, I submit the following:

Exhibit A: Teen fiction often does not use complete sentences. Do you have any idea how many choppy, weird phrases and words are littered on every page? It’s like a grammatical bomb hit it, and pieces lay all over the place, splayed out here and there. I seriously cannot understand why the authors cannot bring a few of these sad little fragments together by using perfectly nice things called conjunctions, or commas, or semicolons. I honestly had to read a few paragraphs over again because the grammar made such little sense.

I will spare you a rant about how Twitter and blogs and text messaging is ruining our ability to communicate in complete sentences. However, I am TERRIFIED that it’s also ruining our ability to THINK in complete sentences.

Exhibit B: I honestly think the characters in teen fiction are far less nuanced and complex. I think this is almost exclusively because the authors, rather than showing you something about the character through actions or dialogue, just flat out TELL you what the character is thinking. This may be the most jarring thing of all, this straightforward, knock-you-over-with-my-authorial-intent sort of style. It’s the difference between sitting down to dinner with someone and inferring thoughts about him/her based on the flow of the evening and sitting down to dinner with someone who just tells you who they are, straight and without break, all the way through dessert.

I realized that I could skim The Hunger Games, because the words didn’t really matter that much. I was using the words as a means to an end, to get to the next plot twist and find out what happened to Peeta. There was no savoring, or paying attention. You didn’t need to feel the cadence of the thing. You just needed to know what happened next. Maybe this is why sometimes these books are improved upon in movie form (which is never, ever the case for good literature, in my estimation). At least you see a sideways glance or sense a mood when you watch it on screen. The book practically barks military orders of action sequences at you.

In contrast, the children’s books I’ve read this year (The Invention of Hugo Cabret, The Mysterious Benedict Society) are well written. The stories are rich and the characters are three dimensional. I did not feel, as a reader, beaten over the head with the author’s intent. The world that was created was more full and whole and lyrical.

So why is it, when it would seem to make good common sense for books to become more complex as the reader gets more mature, do we see such hackneyed, flat and prosaic teen literature? Well, clearly they sell just fine. (I mean, honestly, Stephenie Meyer would likely fail English class in college but she’s made millions…as an AUTHOR.) And obviously, even adults are willing to read them. But when I think about my ten year old graduating up from Hugo and Harry Potter to this brand of shove-in-your-face, grammatically choppy literature, I’d just as soon convince her to stick with the classics. Later, when she’s old enough to know how to spot truly good literature, she can take a foray into The Hunger Games arena for kicks. But Lord, let’s not send our teens there without giving them a good rule of thumb for judging a book: if you’re reading it to enjoy the story and the way the story is told, it’s literature. If you’re reading it not for the words itself but for the basic plot, it’s teen fiction, and should be consumed sparingly.