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Advice for the Pop Culturally Perplexed
We live in a world that is saturated with non-Christian popular culture, and many Christians don’t know how to respond. Some just enjoy it without giving it another thought. Some try to withdraw into a “holy huddle,” avoiding it to preserve their purity. Can we respond in a way that seeks to connect with our children and friends while at the same time guarding our hearts? I believe we can, but we must look past the surface of popular culture to see how it affects one’s worldview. How does popular culture influence worldview? The best popular culture doesn’t preach or … View Resource
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Youth-Driven Culture
Maybe it began earlier than the 1950s and 60s, but those decades seem to mark the rise of the fascination with youth in American culture. The famous line that celebrates all things young, often wrongly attributed to James Dean, declares, “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse behind.” Popular music, that telling barometer of popular culture, has kept pace with this trend. Nearly every heavy-metal band of the 1980s and ‘90s had a stock ballad about young heroes going down in a “blaze of glory.” Other popmusic references stress the invincible power of youth. Rod Stewart sings … View Resource
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Discerning the News
It’s no secret that many Christians harbor deep skepticism of the “liberal media elite.” Some have been burned by the media, noting unfair or unfriendly coverage from the past. “I never just accept what newspapers say about people. I’ve seen them get facts, quotes, and reasons wrong far too many times,” California pastor Rick Warren wrote on Twitter earlier this year. Or, as popular blogger Jon Acuff has suggested, Christians tend to treat the secular media as though it were Satan’s newspaper. The skepticism runs deeply in response to perceptions Americans feel about how the media treats religion. Just 19 … View Resource
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Ecclesiastical Myopia
Perhaps the most remarkable statement I ever heard a man utter from the pulpit was: “He has a penurious epistemology, which tends to be myopic.” I was seated in the balcony of the church when that statement was made, and I could not restrain myself from laughing aloud. I nudged my wife Vesta and said, “I just might be the only person in the church who understood what that man said.” What is a penurious epistemology? A penurious epistemology is a theory of knowledge that is poverty-stricken or on the verge of bankruptcy. Such a view of knowledge, if it tends … View Resource
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The Old Mission Field
Missionaries from Europe and America took Christianity to the ends of the earth and evangelized Africa and Asia. Now, as Christianity declines in the West, churches from the old mission field are the ones defending historic Christianity and are evangelizing Europe and America. Now that the American Episcopal church is embracing homosexuality and rejecting historic Christianity, many conservative congregations from that body are breaking away and affiliating instead with a North American mission from the Anglican churches of Nigeria and Rwanda. When the liberal state church of Sweden refused to ordain pastors who would not accept the ordination of women, the … View Resource
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Bubble Gum and the Trinity
I recently told a class of tenth-graders that what our culture needed was a return to Trinitarian bubble-gum commercials. They were a little nonplussed, and so I hastened to explain that as individuals with one set of ultimate commitments, we have the capacity to live in alien soil, that is, a culture with a different set of commitments. In other words, a Muslim can live and prosper in a Trinitarian culture. In that culture he can live and die a Muslim. But if enough Muslims congregate together, the logical extensions of their fundamental faith will necessarily work its way out … View Resource
