“A revival of formal worship filled with doctrine, laughter, glory, and light would be the first step to a remarkable transformation of the nation” (Mother Kirk, p. 127).
But Not the Formality of an Open Mind
“Obviously, my point of view is that the four-hundred-year imperial dominance of typography was of far greater benefit than deficit. Most of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth and information. I will try to demonstrate that as typography …
The Real Problem
“When we are confronted with worship services conducted by Kuba the Clown, and we marvel at the flag drill team over by the baptistry, we are tempted to attack the weirdness, instead of the doctrinal confusion which preceded it and produced it. That preceding foolishness is always an abandonment, diminution, or alteration of the gospel …
Take This Blog, For Instance
[Speaking of McLuhan] “I believed then, as I believe now, that he spoke in the tradition of Orwell and Huxley—that is, as a prophesier, and I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, …
Some Grim Moses
“Far too many contemporary Christians are gathered around the foot of our postmodern golden calf, not because they want to worship the thing, but just because they like to dance — they like the driving backbeat. Questioned by some grim Moses on their presence there, they say, ‘Why? What’s wrong with dancing/'” (Mother Kirk, p. …
Medium as Message
“In this sense, all culture is a conversation or, more precisely, a corporation of conversations, conducted in a variety of symbolic modes. Our attention here is on how forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content can issue from such forms” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 6).
Overspecification
“But the principle of intelligible worship does not require separate services for valley girls or bureaucrats or any other subgroup with its own jargon. Paul was maintaining that services for Americans should not be held in Chinese, not that surfers should get their own church” (Mother Kirk, p. 124).
Huxley and Orwell
“Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy . . . This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. vii-viii).
Paedobaptism and Porcupines
“The hermeneutic of requiring express warrant from Scripture for all elements of a worship service is essentially a baptistic approach. For example, because we have no express mention of infant baptism in the New Testament, infant baptism is prohibited. Presbyterian strict regulativists try to get away from this by allowing for express warrant through ‘good …
Obvious When You Think About It
“Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns” (George Gilder, Life After Television, p. 48).