Faith and culture ... again

 

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Having served in the Appalachian Mountains with summer missions trips and seeing the landscape-altering effects of kudzu, I could easily relate to T.M. Moore’s apt analogy of comparing kudzu with popular culture in his Redeeming Pop Culture: A Kingdom Approach (P&R, 2003, ISBN# 0-87552-576-8). Kudzu is an insidious, fast-growing vine that was introduced to control erosion, but quickly inundated the surroundings, transforming it into a surreal portrait as it infested and choked off indigenous vegetation.

 

The purpose of Redeeming Pop Culture is to alert “evangelicals to the inherent dangers of an unguarded approach to popular culture, and to highlight the need to equip them to deal with it.” The unavoidable popular culture, in its various forms, “both reflects the spiritus mundi (referring to Yeats’ spirit of the age) and reinforces and shapes it further.” So, in relation to culture, Christians are urged not to ignore, escape or dismiss popular culture, nor to uncritically embrace or indulge in, or be overwhelmed by it. Rather, the recommended kingdom approach to controlling-not eradicating-the kudzu of popular culture is to be “prayerful, intelligent, purposeful, critical, dialogical and redemptive.” Moore develops a three-legged stool model in order to judge the forms of popular culture with beauty, goodness and truth as the legs of the stool, and God’s revealed word, the faith tradition and the working of the Holy Spirit as the braces between the legs.

 

Redeeming Pop Culture is a clear, concise and compelling rendering of what it means to be “salt, light and yeast” in a hurting, dark and lost world. This book will facilitate the formation of a uniquely Christian world and life view as it encourages readers to become “clear and devoted thinkers, who use our minds to guide and shape our hearts.” CPYU could not agree more!

 

-Doug West

 

 

 

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For more information on resources to help you understand today’s rapidly changing youth culture, contact the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding.

 

©2004, The Center for Parent/Youth Understanding