Books
Cultural Consequences
by Jimmy Hopper
One of the Christian web blogs I enjoy is written by Greg Wilbur, Music and Arts director at King’s Meadow Presbyterian Church in Nashville. Greg was a Riverwood college student and while in graduate school at Alabama in the late ‘80’s and early 90’s, he directed the Riverwood Choir. His blog addresses mainly worship, movies, books and culture. The link to the Wilburblog is here.
While reading it recently, I came across a link to a fascinating article from the New Yorker magazine about the demise of reading in Western culture, Twilight of the Books: What will life be like if people stop reading? You can access it here. It is a long article that addresses a number of interesting issues about reading, cultural history, the effects of television, education, how we think, and the potential for historical change in culture. It is well worth the time it takes to read, espcially if you are a parent or are interested in education.
One of the really interesting ideas that the author develops speaks to the way our new visual arts, television and movies (as opposed to reading) increases emotionalism and personality cults in our culture. I have often been literally amazed at the emotional response to celebrity foibles, to the deaths of relatively obscure public figures (i.e. Princess Di), and espcially to the the choreographed emotional “worship” in American evangelism. There are a number of reason to decry these trends. One that I keep returning to is how emotionalism tends to be perhaps the most significant factor in the assualt against the concept of truth; if it is true for you, etc. This “true for you” is almost always an emotional response to how we want things to be and in my judgment is a devastating consequence of these new cultural trends.
Posted by Jimmy Hopper at January 5, 2008 11:01 AM