Here’s a good article published by CNN. More than ever, Christian teens need powerful role models in their parents and youth leaders. Read the story here.

So it’s getting to be that time of year again when we get to experience that inexplicably transcendent feeling that accompanies the realization that one hand is now all that is necessary to count down the days till school starts. YAY.  New Classes!  More Stressing about grades!  College Apps!  SATs!  But seriously..  If you’re like me- or like most people- my guess is that you find it hard to stay 100% on track during the school year – It’s easy to get bogged down with class work, with the social scene- …

Flowers, chocolate, hearts, and supermarkets flooded with the colors red, white and pink.
That’s what is commonly associated with Valentine’s Day, but for the Element Youth Group, it’s a day to be countercultural, as for the past five years, the holiday has gone hand in hand with demonstrating acts of compassion. Each year, instead of waiting around for that special someone to come knocking on our door, we mobilize and go out into the community to model God’s love.
This year, our gifts of handmade cards and blankets went to the …

By Elaine Chen, InterHigh Mentor, Senior @ UC Berkeley
Does separation from your cell phone bring you great anxiety? Does studying ever end up becoming a time of “see how many things I can look up on Wikipedia”? Or has your hearing been severely impaired because of the amount of music you’re blaring into your ears every spare moment in the day? I can relate.
Reading this article reminded me of the downward spiral we’re all heading in with the advent of newer and faster technology. Our world is more and more …

By Jenny Zhao, InterHigh Mentor, Junior @ UC Berkeley
Riding off of Dan’s recent article, I wanted to pose the question of: what does it look like to honor God with your clothing? Like Dan mentioned, I think we have to think critically about what the things on our clothing says, but for girls, another aspect is that of dressing modestly. I have many peers that have been convicted in this aspect of our Christian lives because they realized they needed to honor the people around them through dressing in a …

By Dan Kinder, InterHigh Mentor, Junior @ UC Berkeley
I always knew elements of culture broke into our lives in subtle ways, but sometimes it takes a real life object to set me off thinking about it. The other day I saw a girl at the BART station carrying a bag with the catch-phrase “Live Your Life” printed on it, in very large colorful letters. My first lingering thought was: wow, isn’t that incredibly narcissistic? Of course she probably didn’t really think about it, and it turns out she’s not alone; …

This year, I decided to take a health class that our school offers and requires all students to take. Though at times unbearably boring, we recently watched a documentary produced by Frontline which piqued my interest. This particular documentary followed the lives of several teenagers from a small, well-to-do town. These teenagers had everything a they could possibly want and need: lots of money, the latest in clothing or gadgets, cars, and a few were quite popular at school. However, the makers of the documentary discovered that most felt very …

“There was a time, literally, when there were no teenagers.” What Diana West is suggesting in The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Threatens Western Civilization will undoubtedly sound ridiculous to thousands of youth pastors, family therapists, and advertising gurus whose livelihoods depend on entertaining, counseling, and selling to teenagers. Nevertheless, West argues that adolescence didn’t always exist.

As I try to reach out to my non-Christian friends at school, I tend to rely on argument- debating them and engaging them on a purely intellectually and rational level.  Although there’s nothing wrong with that- indeed, I need to work much much harder to dispel the lies of the world that have their grip on my friends-a problem arises because I tend to forget about the crucial ingredient in evangelism, the seminal part of Christianity itself- Love.
I need to imitate Christ by reaching out in love and letting the …

“7 in 10 girls believe they are not good enough or do not measure up in some way…” “92% of all young women in the USA want to change some aspect of their physical appearance.” “Girls who watched TV commercials featuring underweight models lost self-confidence and became more unsatisfied with their own bodies.”

Doesn’t that all just break your heart? The young people of today are …

I look around school and it’s all but impossible to delineate christians from non christians…Let’s be radically different from the world. Our friends are sprinting headlong down the road to hell and what are we, representatives of Christ, doing?

Here is an eerie commercial that shows what corporations and marketeers do to make the perfect ad.  It seems that we have the power to make ourselves in our own image.  The problem is that it’s all fake.