“The pastiche personality of the baby boomer, a personality suckled on rock music and television during the postwar years, is the major force behind the redrawing of the religious landscape in America today . . . Among the boomers inside and outside the church . . . there is a hunger for religious experience but …
Designer Religion
“The distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture is not primarily moral or even aesthetic, with the one being invariably superior and the other invariably inferior. Richard Rorty’s post-modern philosophical emptiness consists of essentially the same stuff as Madonna’s post-modern philosophical emptiness, and Carl Roger’s psychological narcissism is essentially reduplicated in such magazines as Self and …
Worldliness As Normal
“Worldliness, as we have seen, is that set of practices in a society, its values and ways of looking at life, that make sin look normal and righteousness look strange.” [David Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 86.]
Lots of Disposable Income
“In a significant departure from traditional filmmaking, the videos typically jettison any sort of meaningful narrative in favor of a collage of discordant and often surreal images. The artistic goal of rock videos is not reasoned discourse but a visceral response, an emotional reaction that is ultimately plugged into the consumer culture . . . …
The Fence-Climbing CEO
Once there was a man who was very disgruntled with his employer, and so he began to spread stories around the workplace about all the awful things his employer had done. But the only thing the employer had really done was fail to promote this employee rapidly enough for his liking. Other charges, however, were …
Me and WalMart Some More
Now that my Wal Mart master plan has been exposed, the time has come for me to reveal my ownership and backing of the Moscow Civic Association. So I confess it. The whole thing was my idea . . . kind of a back-handed way of making Moscow liberals look bad. Just get them in …
Worldliness and Modernity
“Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are.” [David Wells, …
Yeat’s Falcon
“We are like Yeat’s falcon, increasingly oblivious to the voice of the falconer. The center no longer holds. All is flung to the periphery, where its meaning is lost . . . We have become T.S. Eliot’s ‘hollow men,’ without weight, for whom appearance and image must suffice.” [David Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand …
Copyright Stuff
For those who are interested in the legal and ethical issues surrounding copyrights, particularly with regard to the republication of old public domain stuff, should check this out.
Me and WalMart
Controversy is swirling around me again, and so I must break my silence. According to a thread on a local listserv, apparently my tentacles extend into the corporate offices of WalMart. It seems, according to this breathless analysis, that I am orchestrating a plot in which I am helping to bring a Super WalMart to …