As we try to understand the disintegration of culture around us, including the prevailing drift of pop culture toward that which is grimy — on the assumption that it is therefore more “authentic” — we have to do some hard thinking about the relationship of flesh and bones. Particulars matter. The way something is enfleshed …
Lowlife Authenticity
Too many parents try to understand the ins and outs of popular culture by trying to study particular artifacts of that culture. But the real thing to get to is the driving engine. What makes it go? What are the foundational presuppositions? If you teach your children to identify those rightly, and to respond in …
Christian Books and Porn
A friend recently gave me the very thoughtful present of some gift credit at Hastings, so I toddled off to Hastings to see what I could see. (I wound up getting some blues CDs mostly.) But that is not the point. While there I noticed (again) the very large section of Christian books in the …
Kill Bills
Not that I want to see them, or encourage others to see them, but allow just a few brief comments on the Kill Bill movies. The extreme violence they contain are sometimes defended as being too cartoonish or ritualistic to be taken seriously, and so we can go and just enjoy the “over the top” …
Deuteronomy or Democracy?
A recent book that insightfully discusses the defining mythos of America is The Myth of the American Superhero [John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002] The authors discuss manifold expressions of that myth, from The Virginian, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the Lone Ranger, to Spiderman, Jaws, Batman, Star Trek, and …