Category: Gospel and Culture

Editor of Paste, Josh Jackson, calls our attention to the prolific violence of American culture:

Violence in the media is a terrible thing. Except of course, for those great battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings…I am really repulsed by the idea of torture-porn flicks like Saw and Hostel, and don’t understand how anyone could enjoy watching them. And I’m bothered by games like Grand theft Auto that put you in the shoes of a gangster. Yet I gleefully watch Samuel L. Jackson burst onto the scene like the vengeful hand of God and lay waste to pathetic junkies in Pulp Fiction…From the Bible to the work of Cormac McCarthy, the best stories are filled with conflict, and often that takes the form of violent antagonists and heroes who fight for justice…So where’s the line?

Where is the line? For those that claim some kind of moral compass, where do we go when confronted by the onslaught of violence in media? Do we watch Ultimate Fighting or flip the channel? For the West, figures like Ghandi and Jesus seem to call us south of violence, to peace. Jesus commanded his disciples to put away swords, pursue peace, not be agitators, to turn the other cheek, and to set minds on things that are pure, and so on. When considering the Bible, there seems to be a conflicting ethic. War in the Old Testament and peace in the New. Does Jesus stand the OT war ethic on its head? I don’t think so. The descriptive war of the OT is not meant to be prescriptive for post-OT culture. After all the OT prophets longed for a time when “swords would be turned to plowshares.”There is a difference between Scripture using war imagery and actually watching war/fighting as entertainment.  For Christians, one question that needs answersing is: “Where is the ethical line between sport and violence in our imitation of Jesus?” Where do you draw the line in violence in pop culture, in the media? Why?

Torch Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Book People! What if we burned books instead of read them? What if reading and reflection became passe? How would you fare? What if, instead of putting out fires, firemen started fires; they burned books and houses that had books in them? If they followed this set of rules:

1. Answer alarm swiftly.
2. Start fire swiftly.
3. Burn everything.
4. Report back to firehouse immediately.
5. Stand alter for other alarms.

This is the world that Montag lives in, the world of Fahrenheit 451, until he meets a renegade thinker, a free-spirited girl who sometimes just sits and thinks. Sometimes she just puts her head back..and lets rain fall in her mouth. “It tastes like wine,” she says.

Have you tasted wine in the rain lately? Have you marveled at the rubbery, bifold shoot of St. Augustine grass that simply grows? Most of us would rather be distracted from reflection that reflect on distraction. As Mortimer Adler has pointed out, most of us would read for entertaiment and information, than for understanding and reflection. Yet, there are a myriad of soul-thrilling thoughts to be had, if we just stop to think. Moving beyond entertainment and information, in an age of information and entertainment, is certainly going against the grain. But so is burning books. Maybe it’s time we revisit our rules, to make sure we aren’t burning the wrong things.