Road least traveled

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 10, 2000 by Arthur Jones

As an attitude, punk signifies teen rebelliousness and alienation, facades for a movement that critiqued consumerism as it celebrated and attempted to reclaim the inner city. The inner city spirit sometimes took the form of "squatting" -- taking up residence in abandoned buildings and the like.

Musical icons included Patti Smith and Television, whose performance base was New York, and the Sex Pistols, who inspired British youth and made Britain one of the movement's hotbeds. Other well-known punk groups included The Clash, X-Ray Spex, the Damned, the Buzzcocks and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

In the 1980s, some U.S. youth influenced by the punk movement described themselves as "hardcore," using a facade of alienation as a cover for their disavowal of tobacco, drugs and promiscuous sex. The "grunge" movement, characterized by slovenly dress, was another outgrowth prevalent in the late '80s and early '90s.

According to www.britannica.com, the Encyclopedia Britannica's Web site, punk's highest point of impact came with Nirvana's success in 1991, a success that coincided with the rise of Generation X. Members of that generation, born in the 1960s, often identified with punk's "charged, often contradictory mix of intelligence, simplicity, anger and powerlessness," according to the Britannica article.

Its underlying philosophy of social transformation rarely developed into organized action, but street demonstrations against the World Trade Organization's meeting in Seattle earlier this year had at their root some of the punk movement's concerns.

--NCR Staff

Study follows up on Catholic initiation

Mark Andersen is one of several hundred-thousand Americans who have become Catholics through the process known as the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults -- recently some 150,000 a year in the United States, according to the Official Catholic Directory.

David Yamane, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, is another. He was so engaged by the experience that he is making the RCIA the topic of his academic research. Among the things Yamane wants to find out are what draws people to Catholicism and, once they've completed the initiation process, what keeps them coming back.

Yamane, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, had attended only two religious services by the time he reached his early 20s. He was unfamiliar even with that most basic of Christian utterances, the Lord's Prayer. He was interested, though, in social issues -- in racial and economic inequalities, for example. He was attracted to sociology through such concerns.

Then, in spring of 1989, he had a sense of the "meaninglessness" of his own life. He was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. He and a group of friends were drinking while watching on television the massacre of Chinese students as they demonstrated for freedom in Tiananmen Square. "I realized these students were dying for the freedoms I took for granted," he said.

That fall he took a course with Robert Bellah, the prominent sociologist of religion, and met for the first time an intellectual who talked explicitly about his faith. Bellah's best-known book is Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California, 1985). Yamane respected Bellah too much, Yamane said, to dismiss the sociologist's religious convictions.