Otherwise, another great essay. I was struck by your point that the young SF/F reader is far more detached than we were (I was born in the same year as you) from the history of the genre, going back well over a century even before you look at the deep roots that go back over millennium. They have been carefully trained either not to realize this fact or to regard it as no loss. Their imaginative pallets are therefore inevitably impoverished.
Comment by Andrew Brew, on http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/10/my-elves-are-different-or-erlkoenig-and-appendix-n/
Wow. Just wow. Detached from the history of a thing they claim to embrace, and either don't know or don't care that there's so much more to be experienced. That is a heart-achingly sad idea, but I have no doubt that the commenter is correct. And not just about science fiction & fantasy.
I see this as equally true about modern American Christianity. So does Rod Dreher, writer for (among other things) The American Conservative. In an article entitled Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and the Failure of Church Leadership Dreher writes:
"I was around not long ago when [this] teenager was talking about how bored he was with church, and thought, yep, this kid is going to walk away from church when he’s a senior, or when he goes to college, and is going to think he has figured Christianity out, and it’s boring and stupid, when in fact she was barely even introduced to real Christianity."And that should make you weep.
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