Millennial Dreams

What are the implications for culture and politics for possible globalization? Paul Smith demystifies much of the controversy and offers searching analyses of a series of cultural phenomena that have emerged in Germany, Britain and the United States during the 1990s.

Technological developments on many fronts have created in our society some extremely difficult moral predicaments. Previous generations have not had to face the dilemmas posed by, for example, the availability of safe abortions, sperm banks and prostoglandins. They have not had to come to terms with an unchecked exploitation of natural resources heralding imminent ecological crisis, or, worst of all, with the recognition that only in this current generation have people the capacity to destroy themselves and their environment. This book seeks to show how, and why, Seventh-day Adventism has addressed these moral issues, and that the ethical questions arising from these issues are especially relevant to the Adventist Church and its development. Dr Pearson looks specifically at the moral decisions Adventists have made in the area of human sexuality, on such issues as contraception, abortion, the role and status of women, divorce and homosexuality, from the beginnings of the movement to 1985.

What are the implications for culture and politics of the current fashion for talking about globalization? In a powerful study of capitalism in the advanced industrial North, Paul Smith demystifies much of the cant that surrounds this discourse and offers searching analysis of a series of cultural phenomena that have emerged in Germany, Britain, and the United States during the 1990s. Opening with a comparison of the rhetoric and the reality of globalization, Smith then makes a study of these three North Atlantic capitalist societies on the eve of the millennium. In Germany he concentrates on the outcomes of unification, in particular on the license to loot the former East Germany. Turning to Britain, he poignantly describes the serried legacies of Thatcherism, including the movement of resistance against the poll tax that ended her dozen-year reign. Then, in a culminating tour de force, he describes the mediatization of US culture that reached its apogee during the Gulf War and is now visible everywhere in the corporate hyping of the Internet and the WorldWide Web.

The Religious Right came to prominence in the early 1980s, but it was born during the early Cold War. Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham, driven by a fierce opposition to communism, led evangelicals out of the political wilderness they'd inhabited since the Scopes trial and into a much more active engagement with the important issues of the day. How did the conservative evangelical culture move into the political mainstream? Angela Lahr seeks to answer this important question. She shows how evangelicals, who had felt marginalized by American culture, drew upon their eschatological belief in the Second Coming of Christ and a subsequent glorious millennium to find common cause with more mainstream Americans who also feared a a 'soon-coming end,' albeit from nuclear war. In the early postwar climate of nuclear fear and anticommunism, the apocalyptic eschatology of premillennial dispensationalism embraced by many evangelicals meshed very well with the "secular apocalyptic" mood of a society equally terrified of the Bomb and of communism. She argues that the development of the bomb, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Cuban Missile Crisis combined with evangelical end-times theology to shape conservative evangelical political identity and to influence secular views. Millennial beliefs influenced evangelical interpretation of these events, repeatedly energized evangelical efforts, and helped evangelicals view themselves and be viewed by others as a vital and legitimate segment of American culture, even when it raised its voice in sharp criticism of aspects of that culture. Conservative Protestants were able to take advantage of this situation to carve out a new space for their subculture within the national arena. The greater legitimacy that evangelicals gained in the early Cold War provided the foundation of a power-base in the national political culture that the religious right would draw on in the late seventies and early eighties. The result, she demonstrates, was the alliance of religious and political conservatives that holds power today.

If you look up "communication gap" in the dictionary, it may as well have a picture of a baby boomer trying to talk to a millennial. These younger workers born from 1980 to 2000 are the largest population in the United States, and they make up a huge portion of the workforce. But all too often, older workers view millennials as entitled or unmotivated. Javier Montes puts those notions to rest in this guide to leveraging the talents of millennials to achieve business objectives. By investing time and effort into training and developing millennials, he's built multiple companies while learning new things along the way. After reading this book, you'll be equipped to: improve the way you attract, manage, and retain millennials; use technology to make business processes more efficient; thrive in a world built around instant gratification; and reward younger workers with what they value most.