TIME on '10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now'

March 19, 2009

TIME magazine's current cover story is "10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now."  The March 23, 2009 issue of the magazine is supertitled, "Annual Special Issue."  As the contents page describes the edition, the focus is on "ten new ideas for our times."

Looking at the "world right now," TIME identified ten ideas that are making a difference.  The list is fascinating.  The ideas range from politics to the economy, and from biomedical technology to theology.  Consider TIME's list of the ten ideas "happening now:"

• Jobs are the New Assets
• Recycling the Suburbs
• The New Calvinism
• Reinstating the Interstate
• Amortality
• Africa, Business Destination
• The Rent-a-Country
• Biobanks
• Survival Stores
• Ecological Intelligence

This is an eclectic list, which makes it all the more interesting.  According to TIME, "we'll start looking at our jobs differently."  As Barbara Kiviat explains, "If that thing you do at the office every day is suddenly your sole financial lifeline, you'll approach it more cautiously.  When you've got only one chip left, you're much less willing to put it on the table."  That article is a helpful reminder that we need to rethink the place of work in our lives.  For Christians, work is never just about a job, but a vocation that includes far more than what the secular work calls work.

For decades, the cultural mavens have expressed little but disgust for the suburbs, but TIME sees a retrofitting and "recycling" of the suburbs as a major new trend.  America's metropolitan centers can hardly afford to leap over vast suburban tracts needing attention.  Bryan Walsh's article acknowledges that millions of Americans steadfastly prefer to live in the suburbs, and he points to innovative models.  Some suburbs, he concedes, won't make it.

Many readers will no doubt be surprised by the third idea TIME says is "changing the world right now" -- "The New Calvinism."  David van Biema points to a shift in evangelical worship music and explains, "Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story."

More:

Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom's hottest links.