A chair by the Campana Brothers, a symbol of luxury now out of style./MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

LENS


A global slowdown, a credit LENS crunch, rising unemployment, falling markets: “It’s a wonderful time,” said the Reverend A.R.Bernard.

As Mr.Bernard, the founder and senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York, explained to Paul Vitello of The Times, bad economies can be good for churches. Calling the current turmoil “a great evangelistic opportunity for us,” he said congregations grow in times of anxiety. “When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors.”

Ministers are not alone in seeing opportunity, spiritual or otherwise, in the midst of distress.

In France, for example, some leading intellectuals are celebrating the recessionary struggles of the nation’s luxurygoods industry, which they say has perverted the culture’s values.“They represent waste, the superficial, the inequality of wealth,”Gilles Lipovetsky, a sociologist who has written several books about consumerism, told Elaine Sciolino of The Times.“They have no need to exist.”

Many people, Ms.Sciolino wrote, now see“the potential for a restoration of the classic French virtues of restraint and modesty.”

Similarly, Michael Cannell wrote an obituary in The Times for the inflated design world of recent years, with its lavish parties and Campana Brothers chairs selling for nearly $9,000. In its wake, there may emerge a more utilitarian emphasis on serving the needs of the masses, as happened during the 1930s.

“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,”Kristina Wilson, an author and art historian, told Mr.Cannell.“It was a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable, intelligent design for a broad audience.”

And if a recession can be good for design, it might be even better for the United States Department of Defense. The anemic job market has made military careers suddenly look attractive again. As Lizette Alvarez reported in The Times, last year all active-duty and reserve forces met or exceeded their recruitment goals for the first time since 2004.

But perhaps nobody is enjoying the downturn as much as the skateboarders of California. As housing developments have stalled and foreclosures have skyrocketed across the state, skaters are finding an abundance of abandoned swimming pools that, when emptied, make perfect skating arenas.

A skateboarder in Fresno, California, who calls himself Josh Peacock told Jesse McKinley and Malia Wollan of The Times,“We have more pools than we know what to do with. I can’t even keep track of them any more.”

Skaters are flocking to the state from as far away as Australia and Germany. And they know whom to thank. In a Web posting referring to the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose policies some blame for the housing bubble, one skater wrote,“God bless Greenspan, patron saint of pool skatin’.”

It may not be the legacy Alan Greenspan had in mind. But these days, maybe he would settle for it.