Once upon a time, in the year 1982, a small and unprepossessing German city called Monchengladbach opened a controversial new museum for contemporary art. Designed by the Viennese enfant terrible Hans Hollein, the Abteiberg Museum heralded an unprecedented era of museum-building in the Federal Republic. Hollein's postmodern extravaganza, which seemed more intent on showcasing the architecture than the art it contained, drew international attention to a city whose name only insiders felt confident to pronounce. Indeed, one might easily make the case that the so-called "Bilbao effect" actually had its genesis in Monchengladbach.

Other municipalities were quick to follow suit: Stuttgart with James Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie (1984), Frankfurt with Richard Meier's Museum fur Kunsthandwerk (1985), Dusseldorf with its Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen by the Danish team of Dissing + Weitling 0985). Frankfurt, which boasted the largest cultural budget in the country, planned a comprehensive museum initiative, which included not only Meier's dazzling ensemble but also institutions devoted to film and to architecture. The latter was ingeniously inserted into a classic riverside villa by Oswald Matthias Ungers, who would later design museums for Hamburg, Dusseldorf and Cologne, as well. As the first of its kind in Germany and one of the first in Europe, the architecture museum helped to sharpen awareness of the built environment, but the true spur to popular engagement was the spate of new museums rising throughout the country.

The economic boom that fueled this phenomenon has long passed, cultural budgets have been decimated, and yet the museum-building trend shows remarkable tenacity. The statistics speak for themselves: in 1970 some 1,500 museums were registered in Germany; in 2000, the last year for which official figures are available, the number had risen to 6,000. In the year 2000 alone, more than 200 new entries were registered. Even allowing for a certain inflation resulting from the unification of the two Germanies, the growth rate is imposing. And while many newcomers are dedicated to themes like glass-blowing, bread-making and local history, the most substantial single category is museums of fine arts, which last year hosted some 10,000 special exhibitions.

In the 1980s, at the peak of the republic's museum-building fever, the cultural establishment never tired of reiterating the fact that more Germans visited museums each year than attended soccer matches. Specific sources for those statistics were never cited, but the numbers set the tone for the cultural politics of that decade. In such a context, it is interesting to note that a much-needed expansion of the Monchengladbach complex (part of Hollein's original concept) was recently rejected by the city council in favor of erecting a new soccer stadium. Yet the impact of those postmodern museum buildings erected in the 1980s should not be underestimated. First of all, they spotlighted the museum--above all, the museum of contemporary art--as a vital, progressive institution with a broad social mandate. No less importantly, they sensitized the society to the issues of architectural quality and originality as Germany became a regular destination for what Stirling once described as "the international flying circus" of contemporary architects. Some of the crucial issues they raised are currently being explored by Dusseldorf's Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in an imaginative exhibition entitled "The 21st Century: New Museums," which will move on to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebeck, Denmark, and other venues.

New Museums: A Richly Varied Spectrum

If the Golden Age of museum-building in Germany has passed, the current scene is far from stagnant. Older collections in Berlin, Leipzig and Munich have lately been handsomely rehoused. Private collections like those of Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden or Marianne Langen at Hombroich Island, near Dusseldorf, have gone public. Others will soon follow, including those of Siegfried Weisshaupt in southern Germany, near Ulm, and of Wuppertal-based Christian Boros, who is presently converting a gigantic World War II-era bunker at the center of Berlin to house his own vision of the cutting-edge art of our time.

The native-son phenomenon is also at work here. At the cultural museum in Osnabruck, for example, Daniel Liebeskind has constructed a bridgelike extension whose varied materials, sloping floors and partially transparent ceilings comprise a spatial homage to the local painter and graphic artist Felix Nussbaum, who died in Auschwitz in 1944. In the town of Bruhl, midway between Cologne and Bonn, the Max Ernst Museum is expected to open in September. Here, the elements of a 19th-century Benedictine cloister have been consolidated and elegantly extended by a "floating" glass entrance hall conceived by the Cologne firm of Thomas van den Valentyn. A few miles to the south and directly overlooking the Rhine, Meier's castlelike extension to the Arp Museum at Rolandseck is currently under construction following decades of bickering and delay. Meanwhile, plans are back on track for a museum honoring the achievements of the masterly Informel painter Emil Schumacher, to be located in Hagen, the nondescript Westphalian city of his birth.

IN THIS COGENT critique of modern evangelicalism, D. G. Hart of Westminster Theological Seminary paints a bleak picture of a movement that he believes is increasingly lacking in theological depth and substance. While admiring the enthusiasm and dynamism of many evangelicals, he laments the fact that evangelicalism itself lacks a solid theological core and therefore is unable to avoid fractures and schism. He also decries the movement's accommodation to the consumerist mentality of the present cultural ethos--manifested, for example, in giving priority to church growth over purity in doctrine. In this connection he warns against a growing secularism in Christian music and worship.

Hart's recommendation is that the term evangelicalism be abandoned as a description of a "separate religious entity" because it woefully lacks theological specificity. It is wrapped in an ambiguity that discourages profound reflection and theological probing. He sees hope in a return to a sacramental understanding of worship and a renewed appreciation for the fathers and doctors of the church universal.

The better way, in my opinion, is to redefine the term evangelicalism rather than jettison it. The term is admittedly contestable, but it could still be useful to the church if it were more closely related to the Protestant Reformation, which is its basis in history. As I see it; evangelicalism is that movement of revival and reform in Christian history that springs from the gospel itself and seeks to renew the church in the light of the gospel. In historical evangelicalism the Bible is set over tradition; grace is set over merit; faith is set over experience. At the same time, faith does not nullify human experience but bears fruit in it. There is no inherent conflict between structure and ecstasy, as Hart suggests. Prior to both is God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ.

Ideally a theology of the Word should be united with a theology of Word and Spirit, and there are ventures in this direction. Karl Barth's contribution is the most notable in recent years, but Barth is nowhere mentioned by Hart. Nor are other theologians who are strongly biblical and who do not hesitate to identify themselves as evangelical (P. T. Forsyth, Alister McGrath, Timothy George, J. I. Packer and myself, for example).

Hart is especially critical of pietism, which he accuses of reducing faith to religious experience. Yet he does not see that formalism and ceremonialism can be as grave a threat to faith as pietism. And repetition of set formulas can obviate the need for personal commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. Nor does he recognize that one can have a high view of the church and be low church in the sense of endorsing liturgical minimalism.

I agree with Hart that we must not confound evangelicalism as a movement of renewal with a conservative political ideology--a temptation today. Rather, those of us who stand in this tradition can celebrate evangelicalism as a movement that keeps us in touch with our Reformation and pietistic roots. We should bear in mind that there is an ambiguity in many other labels used in theology--including Reformed, orthodox, catholic, ecumenical and fundamentalist. All of these are subject to dispute, but this is what theology is for--the purification of our language through renewed submission to Jesus Christ and to the message about him as delineated in holy scripture and attested to in sacred tradition.

Renee Richards walks gingerly down the gravel driveway of her upstate New York home. At 72, she's still active and fit, though a far cry from the imposing athlete who stalked the net at the 1977 U.S. Open, two years after her sex-change operation.

Richards became an unintentional hero when she was outed after an amateur tennis match in La Jolla, Calif. She was 41 years old and had no desire to turn pro. But when tennis officials preemptively told her she couldn't, Richards began a fight that would forever define her life.

"I was happy starting a practice in ophthalmology in California," she recalls. "Then they told me I couldn't play, and all of a sudden I became the world's activist for the sexually disenfranchised."

Transgender people today may turn up in Oscar-nominated films and smash-hit sitcoms, but in 1975 the very idea of gender reassignment was shocking. The sex-change operation of Christine Jorgensen had made international headlines two decades before. But for all intents and purposes, Richards was alone.

"You have to put it in perspective," she says. "Nobody had ever heard of doing anything like this. I was big. I was tall. I was not as strong as the 20-year-old women I was playing, but I was imposing. I was a pariah."

Richards's newly released autobiography, No Way Renee The Second Half of My Notorious Life (Simon and Schuster) revisits stories from her best-selling 1983 memoir, Second Serve. She writes of growing up as Richard Raskin, a boy wearing his sister's clothes, the years-long struggle to have a sex-change operation, and the decision to challenge the United States Tennis Association for the tight to compete against women.

She then brings the stow up-to-date, sharing her bemused accommodation to an ever-changing world, her career as an ophthalmologist, her drive to be a good father (Richards's word) to her son Nicky, and the search for love that continues today.

It's a story Richards is proud to tell and retell. And while she's not shy about recognizing the path she forged, she is hardly the firebrand activist some would wish a transgender poster child to be.

"I'm not an advocate," she says, reflecting on this publication's title. "I'm essentially a pretty passive person--a tennis player and a doctor. "I'm not politically or socially what ordinary people would call an activist."

Richards attributes much of her conventional thinking to her upper-crust education at Horace Mann college prep school in Riverdale, N.Y., and Yale in the 1950s, where she learned the traditional values that she adheres to today. For instance, while Richards believes everyone deserves the legal rights of marriage, she can't quite force herself to think of two women as "married."

"I was born in 1934. Marriage to me meant men and women," she admits. "I have two very close friends three houses up the road. They're lifetime partners and they don't call themselves married."

She quickly adds that they may be bound by the same generational conventions she learned. "They're in their 50s. If they were in their 20s, they'd be demanding it. I know that," she says.

For her part, Richards thinks transgender people should not be able to compete at the highest levels, a belief she realizes undermines everything she accomplished. She suggests transgender females like Canadian mountain biker Michelle Dumaresq and Danish golfer Mianne Bagger play at club events rather than on national teams.

"The U.S. Olympic Committee has decreed in all of its great glory and intelligence that transsexuals can play in the Olympics if two years have passed since their operations--I think that's going to come back to haunt them," she says.

It's not new thinking. Transgender athletes today confront many of the same arguments Richards did 35 years ago. What constitutes gender? Are transgender people fair competition in women's sports? Which locker room do they use?

In the clamor Richards endured during her battle to compete athletically against women, she heard little complaint from the one group you'd expect, her competition.

"I called her and said, 'Can I come listen to you and your story? At least meet you,'" remembers Billie Jean King. "She said sure. I was there for four hours."

"When I look back on it, I'd say it was a remarkably warm welcome," Richards says. "It's not just that they were willing to play me; some of them have stayed close friends to this day. Wendy Turnbull, Virginia Wade, Ilana Kloss, Martina [Navratilova] and Billie Jean and Mary Carillo-they're all very good friends of mine."

King filed an affidavit in court supporting Richards's entry into the U.S. Open. In 1981, Navratilova asked Richards to join her team of coaches as she prepared her epic rivalry with Chris Evert. Nineteen years later Navratilova would insist that Richards induct her into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

This article arises from the authors' experience of undertaking research on behalf of the Scottish Executive, following the deliberations of a national working group focusing on employment (Scottish Executive, 2003) set up to progress the recommendations of the Same as You? review (Scottish Executive, 2000), Scotland's equivalent of Valuing People (DoH, 2001). The detailed findings of the research study and its methodology can be found elsewhere (Ridley et al, 2005); only a brief summary is given here. The main purpose of this article is to contribute to a debate about the achievements and under-achievements of supported employment in the contemporary Scottish context. The research findings are used to discuss where we are now, some of the main problems, and how policy and practice need to move forward and develop. We suggest that the time is ripe to initiate strategic change in policy and professional practice. Supported employment must be firmly embedded in the wider employment landscape and the practice agenda of professionals, in order to ensure that real, paid jobs in integrated settings become a routine option for people with learning disabilities who express these aspirations.

Employment is not a new idea in the field of learning disability. Paid work remains the most culturally valued day activity and, given a choice, many people with learning disabilities aspire to employment as a major life goal (Beyer et al, 2004; Riddell et al, 1999). Traditionally, day centres have had a limited role in providing real jobs. At best they have provided part-time work opportunities, work preparation, volunteering or work experience opportunities (Beyer et al, 2004). The emergence of supported employment, with its emphasis on social inclusion and the support model, together with the technology of training in systematic instruction (TSI) (Gold, 1980), is both more recent and more challenging.

In policy terms, the importance of employment for people with learning disabilities is now firmly established (Scottish Executive, 2000, 2003). Further, the concept of 'employability', together with the policy drive towards bringing into employment people who are deemed to be 'furthest from the labour market', has become a feature of the wider policy landscape. This can be seen in initiatives such as New Deal for Disabled People and New Deal for Welfare (DWP, 2006).

What is new is that, for the first time, there is potential for synergy between broad government strategy on 'employability', the aspirations of people with learning disabilities themselves to have jobs, the availability of the technology (TSI) and the confidence of specialist employment initiatives to deliver successful outcomes. Arguably, these factors offer the possibility of a national focus on supported employment and how to take it forward so that employment can become more commonplace for people with learning disabilities. As part of realising this agenda, research was commissioned in 2003/04 by the Scottish Executive to map current support and to highlight best practice examples (Ridley et al, 2005).

STUDY METHOD

As commissioned, the study undertook a literature review of best practice in 'supported employment' over the last five years and a postal survey of more than 200 providers of 'employment support' in Scotland, explored the experiences of 15 individuals in supported employment, their families and employers, and gathered opinions about barriers, key issues and best practice from strategic stakeholders. A detailed account of the methods used can be found in our research report (Ridley et al, 2005) and associated account (Ridley & Hunter, 2006).

People with learning disabilities were not involved in the design of the research specification, which was issued by the Scottish Executive. This study attempted to address this gap by engaging research associates with learning disabilities who were specifically recruited, trained and paid as part of the research team through Infusion Cooperative. The research associates contributed to the questionnaire design and analysis for the supported employees, their families and the employers, as well as contributing one member to the two-person team which conducted each of these interviews. The research associates made a presentation based on this study at a conference hosted by the Scottish Consortium for Learning Disability in February 2006.

FINDINGS

The number of agencies offering employment opportunities and, therefore, the number of people in employment have been growing steadily in the UK as a result of the development of the supported employment model (Beyer et al, 1996). Supported employment developed originally to facilitate paid work for people with disabilities with ordinary employers in integrated settings. Traditionally, employment has not been available for this group who, because of the nature and severity of their disability, need ongoing support to keep their jobs. It is a highly structured approach to placing people in jobs, providing individual training on the job and systems for maintaining them in jobs, which, importantly, focuses on a 'place and train' approach rather than on getting ready for work or 'train and place' (Vocational Rehabilitation Act Amendments, 1986, USA). It has now become an established and important means of promoting employment for people with learning disabilities in the UK (Beyer et al, 1996; O'Bryan et al, 2000).