Mass Media and Culture

A collection of 24 posts

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Some Problems with Online Christian Communities | And Why You Should Stay Away

Online communities continue to grow Myspace, Virb, Facebook, delicious, flickr, twitter, digg, 30boxes, box.net, etc, etc, all offer a way for people to share and stay in touch.  I personally like the attention web 2.0 companies have paid to making the web more interactive in this way.  I

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Towards a Post-Foundationalist Quaker Theology: Slavoj Zizek, Quietism and Pink Dandelion

Accepting the whole of a tradition and not just the parts I found Slavoj Zizek’s opening to his book The Fragile Absolute, to be instructive for a present day study of Quaker theology.  He begins by presenting the challenge of two choices: How is a Marxist to counter all

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Loving Ourselves To Death? A Theological Reflection of Jesus, Self-Love and Modernity

[This is cross-posted from the BYM blog] In the context of talking about Quaker work, one of our sessions yesterday, something was said about loving ourselves before we can love others. In this dualistic perspective the inward comes before the outward and there is no room for a circular interplay

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TV: It’s Turn Off Your TV Week

I almost forgot to announce that yesterday marked the beginning of “Turn off your TV Week,” sponsored by adbusters.org. There are a number of ways to participate but the simplest way is to unplug the TV for the week. And why not? We have family and friends that would

Blog Entries

Dress Down Friday (on Sunday) | Special Focus “Drive” New Fox TV Show

I almost missed doing a my post of random links from around the web this week, but had a little spare time in between church and lunch today to get this out.  This is great because I have a special edition today with a focus on a show I am

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Reading for Revolution – George Barna and the Emerging Church

Today I had the chance to lead Ryan’s class for the second time this week.  On Tuesday we covered aspects from the book  Emerging Churches, while today we covered questions and key insights concerning one of Barna’s more recent hit titles, “Revolution.”  Here is some of what we

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Trends within the Convergent Friends Conversation

Last week I went to a Friends conference (FWCC) in Rhode Island, and have already talked about it at some length. But the point of this short post was to point out a number of trends, or characteristics that I saw beginning to frame the overall conversation of convergent Friends.

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Elvis Perkins @ the Echo: Already Looks Like A Classic

This past Friday night I went to see Elvis Perkins with Emily, Cate and Bob. Recently, I found out about Perkins through Paste Magazine.  Their review concluded with a statement that grabbed my attention.  They said though this guy hasn’t been around long, and it may be too early

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Online Communities and Radical Reformation Perspectives

Today the Urban Connection of the Mennonite Mission Network has published an article on web communities.  I am really excited about the article, Online Finds: Web Leads to Real Communiy by Ryan Miller, for a couple reasons.  First it shows that the Anabaptists are also asking questions about the global

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Winds of the Spirit: Convergent Friends Workshop (Providence 2007)

As most of you know by now I spent the end of last week in Providence Rhode Island helping with a workshop about convergent Friends.  I wanted to give an overview of what we did there so that those of you who are curious can be in the know. There

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Transitioning in A Global Information Age: Questions For Church Traditions

As a follow up to my reflections on Quaker Heritage Day I wanted to post a list of Questions I’ve been thinking about, many of which came because our travels to the north and many because of what I have been studying over the past quarter. The Church in

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DVDevos – Video Devotionals for Visual Christians

This week I wanted to highlight the ministry of two Evangelical Friends and some of the cool things they’re doing. Matt Taflan and Shawn Belt, both from Ohio, have joined together in Florida to make short video devotionals they are calling DVDevos.  They see this as an opportunity to

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Left Behind Video Game Hopes to Improve Public Relations Before It’s Too Late

[Edited to Add Picture Link see the bottom of post for more details] I’ve writen a couple time on the new Left Behind Video Game called “Eternal Forces.” Post #1 — Left Behind Eternal Forces: Violence for Christians Post #2 Training Violent Behaviors: Media and the Message of Desensitization [rant]

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UCLA and the Taser Incident – We Tase in the Stacks Now

I don’t go to UCLA, but because I live in LA this incident hits close enough to home to draw some reflection and criticism from where I stand.  If you’re not sure what I am talking about Slashdot has a succinct explanation based on the article in the

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Join Me on Buy Nothing Day – November 25th

As a follow-up from yesterday’s article I wanted to mention “Buy Nothing Day.” Adbusters does an event every year where they encourage people to not shop on one of the biggest shopping days of the year – November 25th (Saturday).   Emily and I will be joining them and I’d

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Culture Jam and the Radical Reformation

I just finished reading “Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge–And Why We Must” (Kalle Lasn) for the first time over the weekend. This was another book assigned for Ryan’s class, which I will be leading a discussion on this coming thursday.   Sometimes I wonder

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Training Violent Behaviors: Media and the Message of Desensitization

I had the opportunity to read a fascinating and very thought provoking book this past week called, “Transforming the Powers: Peace, Justice and the Domination System.” The basic idea of the book is taken from Walter Wink’s idea of the “powers and principalities” which consist of the “spiritual dynamics

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Spending Money as Christians: A Quaker Perspective

Last night Emily and I had the opportunity to hang out with some of our good friends from Ohio and eat some fantastic sushi.  During the course of the evening, we encroached on a sometimes-touchy subject (except for this night): How Christians spend their money. The conversation almost always turns

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The Daily Scribe: New Religion Blog Community and Aggregator

I have received the priviledge to join Shawn Anthony from Lo-Fi Tribe in a new venture called the Daily Scribe.  Shawn, formerly a member of the largely popular 9rules blogging community, has decided to leave his post there as religion community leader to start his own venture at Scribe. Because

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World Hunger and Sustainable Eating

It’s important for me to point out a fellow Fuller PhD student, Russ Kirby, who has written a stellar argument for having a sustainable Diet. Russ, a practical theologian, says, If there is enough food to fully feed the world, then why are 840 million people still literally starving

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Left Behind Eternal Forces – Violence for Christians

Today in the Los Angeles Times, there is an article about a new “Christian” video game: Left Behind: Eternal Forces. The game aims to make a broadly appealing video game, similar to Grand Theft Auto; it is a “real-time” strategy game that “features plenty of biblical smiting, albeit with high-tech

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What Evangelicalism is: Part II

I have a disclaimer to make, I’ve been working on these posts for the past week, and as of last night I’ve had to rewrite and change course for this discussion.  This is largely due to a conversation that I had with two good friends James Pitts and

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writing letters with bread for the world’s holly hight

Last night our mennonite/quaker small group wrote letters to our congressional representatives concering hunger issues in the world.  It was my first time to participate in this kind of advocacy and I thought that it was incredible.  It only took about 15 min. to write the letters, and I

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the media, culture and the past year #1

Well I must say I’ve been happy to see all the commenting and interest into the things that have been written about as of late, and I encourage the discussions and comments to continue until things are seen more clearly.  I make myself available as a resource for questions