“When you do away with the old High-Low [brow] hierarchy, people become more obsessed than ever with status” [John Seabrook, Nobrow (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 168].
Why NPR Listeners Think They Are Aristocrats
“For more than a century, the elite in the United States has distinguished themselves from consumers of commercial culture, or mass culture. Highbrow/lowbrow was the language by which culture was translated into status—the pivot on which distinctions of taste became distinctions of caste. The words highbrow and lowbrow are American inventions, devised for a specifically …
The Movie of Me
“I stood there for a moment longer in the yellow tornado light while the techno music in my ears reorganized my consciousness into cleaner lines than the gangsta vibe . . . implanting in the folds of my cortex the way poetry used to before I got a Discman and made pop music the soundtrack …
And Not Just Billy Idol Either
“My answer to the question about Christian involvement with popular culture is essentially the same. You can enjoy popular culture without compromising Biblical principles as long as you are not dominated by the sensibility of popular culture, as long as you are not captivated by its idols.” [Kenneth Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede …
Churchacabana
“But try telling someone from the Barry Manilow School of Liturgy that something is schlock and they will regard you as an arrogant elitist.” [Kenneth Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1989), p. 99].
Folk Culture and Popular Culture
“Folk culture has the values and aspirations of a community. Popular culture, on the other hand, presupposes the absence of a community of belief or conviction. It is for many a means of escape from such a community” [Kenneth Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1989), p. 61].
This is Not What We Meant by a Postmillennial Takeover
“It has not gone unnoticed in the secular world that there is gold in these religious hills. The result is that today there are evangelical publishing houses which are the religious arms of secular corporations, and Songs 4 Worship, a successful collection of Christian music, lavishly advertised on the TV networks was launched by Time-Life. …
Fraudulent Meaning
“Postmoderns who have, in one way or another, pointed to the emptiness of life, the absence of meaning, of enduring, stable value structures, are astonishingly close to the truth—far closer, in fact, than many in the Enlightenment period who lived off fraudulent meaning” [David Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), p. …
Oblique Nihilism
“Once our world was centered; now it is not. Once there were ultimate principles of criteria; now there are not. Once there was Authority; now there are only authorities, specialists who have mastered a small corner of life’s complexity. We have been left to drift in the flow of melting reality. This is our nihilism. …
Seinfeld and De Profundis
“Postmoderns live on the surface, not in the depths, and theirs is a despair to be tossed off lightly and which might even be alleviated by nothing more serious than a sitcom” [David Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 177].