Archive for the 'Culture' Category

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Douthat: A Tough Season For Believers

Published on December 21, 2010 in Christmas, Culture and Recommended Reading. 0 Comments

Ross Douthat has written a concise and profound column for the New York Times.  In it he points to one of the most important books of the year, James Davison Hunter’s book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.

I am sorely tempted to share Douthat’s conclusion because it so concisely summarizes the question we wish to address here in Stillman Valley.  But, I’ll make you click through to read it. Douthat deserves the traffic.

Christmas is hard for everyone. But it’s particularly hard for people who actually believe in it.

In a sense, of course, there’s no better time to be a Christian than the first 25 days of December. But this is also the season when American Christians can feel most embattled. Their piety is overshadowed by materialist ticky-tack. Their great feast is compromised by Christmukkwanzaa multiculturalism. And the once-a-year churchgoers crowding the pews beside them are a reminder of how many Americans regard religion as just another form of midwinter entertainment, wedged in between “The Nutcracker” and “Miracle on 34th Street.”

These anxieties can be overdrawn, and they’re frequently turned to cynical purposes. (Think of the annual “war on Christmas” drumbeat, or last week’s complaints from Republican senators about the supposed “sacrilege” of keeping Congress in session through the holiday.) But they also reflect the peculiar and complicated status of Christian faith in American life.

Read the rest here.

HT: Denny Burk

Mohler on NY Times Magazine on “Failure to Launch”

Published on August 25, 2010 in Culture and Parenting. 0 Comments

One of the things I appreciate most about Dr. Mohler’s leadership is his interaction with current issues.  Dr. Mohler writes:

The New York Times Magazine addresses an important question in its August 22, 2010 cover story — “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” With this cover story, the venerable newspaper gives cultural attention to a phenomenon some now call “failure to launch.” In her article, writer Robin Marantz Henig probes this issue with care and insight. In all probability, this cover story will be discussed for years to come.

The reason for this becomes clear once you read the essay. Henig lets her readers understand the scale of the issue — we are not talking about a passing phenomenon that is linked to the economic recession. We are talking about a major change in the way young people move toward adulthood . . . if they are moving toward adulthood.

As Henig summarizes:

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

The focus of Henig’s article is on young people in their 20s — a period she describes as a “black box.” As a generation, they are constantly moving residence (one-third move each year), changing jobs (average is seven jobs in their 20s), and moving back home with parents (one-third at least once). Two-thirds cohabitate with “a romantic partner” and delay marriage until their late 20s.

Henig cites one sociologist who calls all this “the changing timetable for adulthood.” How big a change? Consider this: In 1960, the vast majority of young adults had accomplished the five standard milestones used to measure adult status. These milestones include completing school, leaving home, getting married, having a child, and establishing financial independence. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, less than one-half of all young women reached these milestones by age 30 in 2000. Even more concerning — less than one third of all young men did.

The rest here.

Douthat on the Mosque Controversy

Published on August 17, 2010 in Culture, Missions and Politics. 1 Comment

Ross Douthat’s thoughts on the NYC mosque/Ground Zero controversy are the most insightful I have heard thus far.

There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-so-great granddaughter of the Pilgrims.

But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than just a set of political propositions. This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well. It draws its social norms from the mores of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora — and it expects new arrivals to assimilate themselves to these norms, and quickly.

Here to read the whole thing.

HT: Mike Wittmer

The number one threat for America?

Published on August 8, 2010 in Culture and Missions. 1 Comment

Scott Moore points to what one professor says is the number one threat to America.  I suspect he is correct.

I will never forget the serious look on Dr. Richard Pratt’s face one Monday night as he was expressing his number one fear for the next generation. It was not alcoholism, or disease. It was not liberalism, or the church’s view on women being ordained (or not) in ministry. He looked across the classroom and called all of us to take heed to the Islamic growth in America. One statistic I remember is that the census reported that by year 2025, one major metropolitan city, in America, will be predominately . . .

Read the rest here.

HT: Z

Comparing Wilder’s Our Town with 2010’s New York

Published on April 29, 2010 in Culture. 3 Comments

After I read this post by Patrick Deneen, I went to my shelf and took down a copy of Our Town for summer reading. It’s worth comparing the “Friends” culture with Grover’s Corner.

. . . The juxtaposition of Grover’s Corner and New York captures the essence of two different worldviews.  In the one, the challenge of human life is to reconcile our capacious longings with our need for home, belonging and fellowship, and the scales are tilted decisively in favor of the latter.  Mrs. Gibbs speaks longingly in the first Act of her desire to visit Paris before her death, but we discover at the end of the play that she gives her "legacy" – which was to fund her journey – to her daughter and her new husband so that they can make some repairs on their farm.  The play’s end shows us that our ultimate orientation toward Eternity throws into relief the insignificance of the affairs of daily life, yet that the modest daily acts of cooking, cleaning, discussing the day’s events, are suffused with a kind of beauty and significance that too easily escapes us when we fail to notice the fact of living.   The fellowship of those with whom we pass our lives, and with whom we ultimately lay in burial, connects the diurnal to the eternal.

In the other worldview – there again all around me as I exited the play into the Village bar scene in full swing – institutionalizes discontent, reinforces restlessness, and fosters and endless and intense suspicion that something better lies around the corner, reducing any commitment we might have to the "given" in favor of the "not yet." "Belonging" is understood to be complacency; limits are seen as unacceptable oppressions; imperfection is a condition needing cure, solution, repair – and barring those, escape. Both conditions generate regret, because we are creatures of belonging and longing.

The rest here.

HT: Rod Dreher

Millennials are honest on faith and they have good questions!

Published on April 28, 2010 in Culture. 0 Comments

I met this afternoon for an hour with a group of eight eighth graders.  It was one of the most enjoyable meetings I have ever had as a pastor.  They had thoughtful and honest questions about what the Bible teaches:

  • How old will we be physically on the New Earth?
  • Why doesn’t Jesus come back now and top the suffering?
  • Will we have pets on the New Earth?

I can’t imagine a greater blessing than to sit and talk honestly with young people about those sorts of questions.

A USA Today article makes observations about the new generation of young adults.  What a great opportunity to point young people to Truth:

Many Millennials are religiously adrift — vaguely Christian in belief and barely Christian in practice, a new survey finds. So it’s no surprise that those one in six or seven who are active and committed to faith might be feeling a little isolated.

Rebecca McKinsey, a 19-year-old journalism student at Ohio University, is active in an evangelical fellowship on her campus in Athens and in a local church.

Inside those settings, there’s love, joy and reinforcement. "We’re pretty passionate Christians in my church family," she says. But outside, she often feels alone among her peers.

Read the rest here.

HT: The Resurgence for the USA Today link

Tim Keller blogs about the big issues facing the Western church

Published on February 23, 2010 in Church and Culture. 1 Comment

Tim Keller is one of the wisest pastoral voices today in the Western hemisphere.  Read his thoughts about what the Western church faces in the days to come:

1. The opportunity for extensive culture-making in the U.S. In an interview, sociologist Peter Berger observed that in the U.S. evangelicals are shifting from being largely a blue-collar constituency to becoming a college educated population.

His question is–will Christians going into the arts, business, government, the media, and film a) assimilate to the existing baseline cultural narratives so they become in their views and values the same as other secular professionals and elites, or b) will they seal off and privatize their faith from their work so that, effectively, they do not do their work in any distinctive way, or c) will they do enough new Christian ‘culture-making’ in their fields to change things? (See http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/HHR_Archives/AfterSecularization/8.12PBerger.pdf)

2. The rise of Islam. How do Christians relate to Muslims when we live side by side in the same society? The record in places like Africa and the Middle East is not encouraging! This is more of an issue for the western church in Europe than in the U.S., but it is going to be a growing concern in America as well.

How can Christians be at the very same time a) good neighbors, seeking their good whether they convert or not, and still b) attractively and effectively invite Muslims to consider the gospel?

3. The new non-western Global Christianity. The demographic center of Christian gravity has already shifted from the west to Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

More here.

“As long as there are people who weep, apostasy is not total.”

Published on September 3, 2009 in Culture, Isaiah and Recommended Reading. 0 Comments

I recently encouraged people to read Isaiah 59:9-15.  Admittedly, they are not upbeat verses.  In this section, Isaiah laments over Israel.  You won’t need the the prophetic gifts of Daniel to see their application for our day.

“Therefore justice is far from us, and righteousness does not overtake us; we hope for light, and behold, darkness, and for brightness, but we walk in gloom. We grope for the wall like the blind; we grope like those who have no eyes; we stumble at noon as in the twilight, among those in full vigor we are like dead men. We all growl like bears; we moan and moan like doves; we hope for justice, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far from us. For our transgressions are multiplied before you, and our sins testify against us; for our transgressions are with us, and we know our iniquities: transgressing, and denying the Lord, and turning back from following our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart lying words. Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off; for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice.(Is 59:9-15).”

It is significant that Isaiah writes this prayer in the first person.  In the first 8 verses of 59, Isaiah spoke in the second person: “You.”  But, now he shifts to “we” and this is no small detail.  Isaiah knows he is in solidarity with Israel – - a part of their awful predicament.

“Whether [Isaiah] is directly implicated in their sins or not, he is surely a participant in their grievous results.  John Oswalt.

So, Isaiah laments.

We also should cry.  We are in solidarity with this land where “Truth is lacking,and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey.”

But, Barry Webb’s words encourage us even amid the blurry tears of lament.

What can we do but weep?

Weeping, in fact, is exactly what we get here. Verses 9-15a are what is generally called a communal lament, of which there are many examples in the Psalms. It is the kind of prayer that is prayed by desperate people and comes out in long, wracking sobs. The good thing about weeping is that it means we have given up pretending that things are all right, or that we have the resources to deal with them. It means we have come to an end of self-justification and self-trust. We have faced the fact that deliverance, if it is to come at all, must come from outside ourselves. . .

It is hard to imagine a situation more desperate in the life of God’s people than the one described here. But, of course, there is one element of hope, and that is the lament itself. As long as there are people who weep, apostasy is not total. The faithful few hold the door ajar, so to speak, for God to enter the situation again and drive the darkness back. (Barry Webb, 228).

Let us hold the door ajar with our tears.

*********************

Barry Webb’s commentary on Isaiah is accessible to all readers and is splendid. I highly recommend it to all readers.  It would ideal for someone who decided to do devotions from Isaiah.  Concise.  Profound.  “Derek Kidner like.”

Neil Postman Lecture on Living in a Technological Society

Published on August 29, 2009 in Culture and Recommended Links. 1 Comment

Tony Reinke has posted links to a Neil Postman lecture available on You-tube.

The late Neil Postman was the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death.  If you are interested in how technology is shaping our identity you will profit from this.

Click here.

Why Do People Live Unexamined Lives?

Published on August 20, 2009 in Culture and Quotes. 0 Comments

Os Guinness (in Joe Gibbs, Game Plan for Life):

One reason people live unexamined lives is because of what Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth-century French scientist called “diversions.”  We are reluctant, even afraid, to admit that we all, without exception, will die.  We surround ourselves with entertaining distractions so we don’t have to think about death.  We tranquilize ourselves with the trivial.  Has any generation ever been able to divert itself so happily for so long and with so many fascinating toys as ours?  With our BlackBerries, iPhones, iPods, and TiVos, we can lose ourselves in virtual reality and be entertained and distracted forever– “amusing ourselves to death,” as best-selling author Neil Postman puts it.

. . . The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy told the story of a peasant who worked furiously to acquire more and more land—all for good and worthy reasons—until he finally dropped dead in the process.  Tolstoy called the story “How much land does a man need?” and he answered his own question at the end: “Six feet from his head to his heels.”