“This situation has stolen up upon us so quietly that its real nature is largely obscured. I believe that what Camille Paglia, provocatrice extraordinaire, has said with respect to our pop culture is correct. We are witnessing, she asserts, ‘an eruption of the never-defeated paganism of the West.’ Her thesis, which she developed in some …
The Pudding That Proves
“According to a popular mythology in more conservative circles, the nineteenth century was a time of strong traditional values, when it was actually a monkey house of radicalism. The traditional values, such as they were, were the harvest of what had been planted in previous centuries — vestiges of Christendom. But the crop that was …
Pastiche Personality
“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 …
Muddling About
“But studied neutrality is impossible, and obnoxious examples are cropping up more and more frequently, in fulfillment of a collegial application of the dictim that a man who doesn’t stand for something will fall for anything. We now find the Zeitgeist appearing in raunchy requirements for classes, ‘revivals’ that resemble group therapy confessionals, and urbane …
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 …
Too Much Jelly
“By the thousands, parents are saying, ‘Not with my kid, you don’t,’ and have enrolled their children in private academies, have started to homeschool, take taken advantage of tutorial services, and so forth. However, this growing challenge to secular education has some necessary ramifications in the years to come, for which established evangelical colleges are …
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.]
Mail Order Minister
“When a pastor retires or dies, the usual tendency is to scramble, form a pastoral search committee, and . . . you know the rest of the drill. An outsider, someone who is not in touch with the local and organic life of that particular congregation, is called, and he steps into the pastorate. His …
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 . . . …
Future Generations of Ministry
“Nevertheless, a local church that takes its mission of evangelism and discipleship seriously should be able to fully train leaders for service in the local church. Any calling that is incapable of reproducing itself is incompetent in that calling. This training is for her own leaders in the years to come. A thriving church can …