“Expressive individualism, which grew out of the Romanticism of the late eighteenth century and today has an especial affinity with our therapeutic culture, assumes that all people have a unique core of intuitions and feelings within them that is then coupled with the understanding that they have the inherent right to pursue and express these …
The Pagan Pendulum
“Knowing this, we infer that periods of the past must have been much more elevated than our own. This, of course, is a questionable conclusion. What does seem to be the case, however, is that often, as periods succeed each other, some of what takes place is driven by reaction. The Apollonian impulse is often …
Once Carefree
“We have known too many kids, like the younger son in the parable, who have separated themselves from their parents, thrown off the traces, and heard in the lure of the far country . . . the promise of adventure and boundless pleasure. And for so many this has turned to ashes. The grand and …
Pagan Tug of War
“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 …
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 …
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 . . . …
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 …