Archive for the ‘Television’ Category

Entertainment Tonight!

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Many Christians are worried about the effect movies are having on American culture. As a Newsweek reporter wrote:

People can croak, “Entertainment, Entertainment,” until they are blue in the face. The fact remains that films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Superman,” and even “Star Wars” have become jerry-built substitutes for the great myths and rituals of belief, hope and redemption that cultures used to shape before mass secular society took over.

Television has become the command center of our new epistemology. It promotes shallow thinking and has pretty well killed reading and rhetoric. The clearest way to see through a culture is to see how it speaks to itself. The television has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse. Truth is not and can never be show business. (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death). Americans want show business. This is one danger of our fascile Christian culture (Dawn, Dumbing Down).