Art and Culture

1. Biblical Perspectives 2. Hot Issue: Multi-Ethnic Congregations/Church Communities OR HUP (Homogeneous Unit Principle) Churches? 3. General 4. Videos 5. Websites ____ 1. Biblical Perspectives The Bible as Authority as an Antidote to Cultural Imperialism Bible Translation in Historical Context. The Changing Role of Cross-Cultural Workers (International Journal of Frontier Missiology) A Brief Investigation of [...]

I’ve just finished reading No Country For Old Men by Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy, which was also made into an Academy Award winning movie. It’s a dark and disturbing novel with the interspersing of Sheriff Tom Bell reflections indicating the progressive disintegration of American society. For example, he speaks of coming across a survey sent out [...]

In the September 2010 issue of Evangelicals Now Eleanor Margesson has some helpful advice on cinema-going for Christians (Should we watch this?). In this article Margesson refers to Tom Hovestal’s book Extreme Righteousness: Seeing ourselves in the Pharisees: Tom Hovestal points out that the Pharisees ardently believed in the mandate that they read in the [...]

An In Movies comment on Quentin Tarantino, notes how his first movie, Reservoir Dogs, set a new standard for on-screen realism in brutality. It recalls: One scene audiences found particularly disturbing was that in which Michael Madsen’s character, Mr. Blonde, gleefully dances to ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’ by Stealers Wheel while torturing Marvin [...]

“Bad Wisdom” is sung by Suzanne Vega. These lyrics leave unclear exactly what the underlying cause of shame might be, allowing them to be applied to a number of different situations. The words concern a young girl whose relationships with her friends and with her mother have been irreparably damaged because of some ill-advised sexual experience.  Mother the doctor knows something is wrong [...]

  During his 27 years of captivity on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela was inspired by a poem of defiance written by the English poet William Ernest Henley, a poem he used to strengthen the spirits of other prisoners. Indeed, the name of this poem became the name of a 2009 film that stars Morgan Freeman and [...]

Sam Sparro writes the following lyrics in his song Black and Gold: If the fish swam out of the ocean and grew legs and they started walking and the apes climbed down from the trees and grew tall and they started talking _ and the stars fell out of the sky and my tears rolled [...]

For insight into popular self-absorbed ethics and the fear it involves, listen to the lyrics of The Fear as sung by Lily Allen: I want to be rich and I want lots of money I don’t care about clever I don’t care about funny I want loads of clothes and f**loads of diamonds I heard [...]

In the movie The Maltese Cross, Humphrey Bogart plays the role of Dashiell Hammett’s famous hard-nosed detective, Sam Spade. Hammett’s world is a godless world, ruled by chance and violence with individuals being alone in a meaningless world. Macbeth lives in a similar kind of world. Macbeth is a tragic figure. Michael Rockler sees Macbeth [...]

Scientific research conducted at the University of Southern California has resulted in the claim that fast-moving virtual games and online news feeds may be encouraging indifference to human suffering: In a media culture in which violence and suffering become an endless show, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in. This research was [...]