Events shaped today’s adults

Each era of history had rulers or inventors who made significant changes in the course of future events.

I am most awed by what transpired in the 20th century because it shaped the adults of today. It was “our time.” Within the first five years of the1900s, Ford produced his Model T, Edison invented electricity and the Wright brothers managed to stay airborne for a short time at Kitty Hawk.

By the end of the century, super highways crisscrossed our country and encircled our cities. Yet, there never seemed to be enough lanes or stretches of roads for cars.

Edison not only illuminated the world but made possible all the industrial motors and gadgets for the home, utilitarian and recreational, and enabled the technological revolution to emerge. Aircraft not only carried passengers and goods but became a weapon for war. Knowledge gained from aerodynamics enabled astronauts to travel into space and to the moon and back.

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam and the continuation of warfare; the Stock Market crash and the Great Depression; the dust bowl in the West; and the civil rights clashes in the South brought disruptions in community life. These were major events that impacted life in the 20th century.

There are some individuals who view the changes that occurred as more than just evolutionary. They see them as a pivotal change in the perception of humanity’s role on the planet. What began to emerge was a theory of global consciousness.

After World War II, the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote from his New York residence, “The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth ... to continue to place our hopes in a social order achieved by external violence would simply amount to our giving up all hope of carrying the Spirit of the Earth to its limits.”

Cyberbard John Perry Barlow wrote, “Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness ... Teilhard saw the Internet coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would ultimately coalesce into the living unity of a single tissue of experiences containing our collective thought.”

In England, Cambridge scholar Peter Russell draws upon his degrees in mathematics, physics, psychology and computer sciences in his book “The Global Brain.” Russell’s commitment is furthering both the evolution of consciousness and the actualization of humanity’s untapped potentials. He maintains that it is only by inner exploration that we will find the resources to take us into a new era of human progress.

This “inner exploration” refers to that which comes from within the individual or organism. It has been termed “emergence” to differentiate from “evolution.”

John H. Holland, a leader in the study of complexity, shows in his book “Emergence: From Chaos to Order” that a theory of emergence can predict many complex behaviors and can teach us much about life, the mind and organization.

Writer Joanne Blume comes to the conclusion that, “If emergence theory teaches us anything, it’s that something lives in us.”

That brings us to a basic tenet of religious thought. We are body and soul and the soul communicates with us differently than the brain does. For many people in Scripture, dreams were an important medium. More often today, it’s those subtle urges, intuition, or some serendipitous series of events that cause us to stop and pay attention.

Phyllis Tickle, the founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, has authored more than two dozen books, and is a lay minister in the Episcopal Church. In her 2012 book, “Emergence Christianity,” she records, decade by decade, the roots of a diverse set of Christian movements and analyzes them for their impact. She writes that Emergence Christianity is being born. She views the Catholic Worker Movement started in 1932 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin as the beginning of emergence in the United States. Emergence isn’t just about live-in communities, it is when a group of individuals spontainously feel called to fulfill a humanitarian need at a particular local. Most are faith-based but include members of various denominations and even the unchurched.

The Valley can be proud of the accomplishments of ACTION (Alliance for Congregational Transformation Influencing Our Neighborhoods) as it seems to fit the definition of an emerging group making a positive impact in the Valley.

Dr. Agnes Martinko is a member of St. Edward Church in Youngstown.