Book Club
Meetings are scheduled on the church calendar. The next “fallback meeting time” is March 15. See below to participate in choosing a better time for you.
An email list helps us coordinate. To get involved, send a blank email to cpsl-bookclub+subscribe@googlegroups.com,
then confirm with a reply.
We are just starting our current book: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. This book has made a deep impression on those who notice cultural changes since the advent of the iPhone and social media. The changes affect every family, school, and church. Our parents, faculty, and Board for Christian Education may be especially interested in the author’s diagnosis and recommendations concerning the healthy use of technology. It will be a good book to read and evaluate together from the standpoint of our biblical, Christian worldview. Here is the text from the opening dust cover:
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures Why?
In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature them into competent, thriving adults. He shows how the play-based childhood began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the phone-based childhood in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this great rewriting of childhood has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.
Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the collective action problems that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.
We have a limited number of copies to give to book club participants. The club invites our faculty and membership to consider joining in the discussion.
To choose a meeting time, please click here and use this simple tool with your calendar open to share when you could possibly fit a meeting into your schedule. If we do not have much participation in this scheduling effort by March 14, we will meet in the afternoon of Sunday, March 15.
Books planned or available for the future:
Dying to Live by Harold Senkbeil
The Divine Comedy by Dante Aleghieri
Past books:
On the Freedom of a Christian (1520) by Martin Luther