NextGenKent

  https://thehustle.co/originals/why-you-almost-never-see-a-clock-at-the-mall The word “whore” may have different definitions to some, but I want to use it as a woman who markets herself for the sole purpose of robbing men of their life for her own gain--whatever her “gain” is: monetary, lust, or otherwise. She is the reverse-consumer and profiteer at the same time, a vampiress, a luxurious drunk, functioning alcoholic. Her appeal is a marketing scheme based on not just years of study, but an exquisite composition of research and development where she is both scientist and evidence, psychologist and client--in an endless cycle and sinister feedback loop of trial and error, hypothesis and investigation, feeding and consuming. All the while tricking you into believing you are the main character. But it isn’t about you. You have entered her Nirvana constructed for you to “remain inside” her. Once her legs are wrapped around you, she is sure to suck your life away. And as titillati...

Reaction to: Shane Hipps, Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith, 2009. This book really preaches. It is one of those books that doesn’t just tell you how to do it—it is doing it while it is telling you how! If we look at our computer screens and refocus we can actually see our own reflection on the screen (or the outline of our reflection)—this reminds us of who we are and that we are not our computers (and our computers are not us). This “magic eye” methodology—the training of the eye to see what is there but normally overlooked—is how we need to approach the technological advances of today as well as how we live our lives as the Church in the world. We must walk the line however fine it may be between observing the 2nd Commandment of not making for ourselves graven images and using images to convey a message. The methods we chose speak a message themselves as Marshall McLuhan was quoted, “the medium is the message” (25). Even the television screen is a part of th...

William D. Romanowski, Eyes Wide Open: Looking For God In Pop Culture (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press) 2009. Remarking about the kind of faith informed engagement with popular art and culture, Romanowski states that, “Our aim should be to preserve the best features, improve the weakest parts, and eliminate the worst traits of popular art” (23). This is really what the entire book sets out to show us how to do—practically, emotionally, spiritually, but most of all with great discernment. This really is a very good book! At each turn with the author’s setting up of his point-illustration-principle-vision layout, many times I found myself guessing correctly which movie he was going to be citing next. I found this statement on paradigm shifts needing to happen very interesting: “The change is signified by a remaking of cultural perceptions and the introduction of new questions and standards for acceptable solutions” (p35). With the fast pace of technological advancements and media’s barra...

A reaction to Nancy Pearcey's book, Saving Leonardo: A Call To Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Meaning, 2010. The author finishes this book with an inspiring assertion: “We are called to revolt against false idols and the power they exert over the minds and hearts. Christians should be on the front lines fighting to liberate society from its captivity to secular worldviews” (p278). This comes after a quote from Francis Schaeffer, “One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary”--against the status quo. Pearcey argues the way to do this is through the artists (as prophets) in the church, who like Bach, could inspire a spiritual revival and spark a global revolution. I am unsure this author’s methodology in this book would achieve that level of inspiration. This book needed to be written. There is so much good information laid out in fair historical patterns. The ...

A reaction to John Van Sloten's, The Day Metallica Came To Church: Searching For The Everywhere God in Everything ,  2010. This book caused me to rethink some of my foundational theologies, specifically Creation and the Fall. If God created us in His image and declared His creation as ‘very good’, what consequences did the sin of Adam and Eve have upon us? How deep does it go? I have some very strong thinking patterns that hold everything as either good or bad, God’s or Satan’s, black or white. This either/or (dualistic?) outlook doesn’t leave room for the mysterious. But what if all of these things were meant to lead me to something more? What if I always stopped short because I was led to believe that when I came to a certain point I had arrived—mission complete--stop here and move on to another subject? And what if that wasn't true? I was challenged by the thought of how God speaks to us outside of the Bible. I have believed that God speaks to me through many things (...

A reaction to H. Richard Niebuhr's, Christ and Culture, 1951. This book seems to leave us to choose and that in itself is both puzzling yet refreshing. It leaves us to choose what to DO with the truth we possess. But it also shouldn’t lead us to believe we must choose one of the five typologies Niebuhr gives. There may be another answer and I believe there is. Niebuhr also leads his readers into desiring to choose the (his?) fifth type even though he makes it seem like any of them would be okay to choose. There is also the choosing of being more biblical in our own response to culture rather than just following the philosophy of those who have gone before. The problem we all live in is: How do we relate to the culture around us and to those within that culture. There must be a hammered out way of doing this by now with so much church history behind us! And I would agree—the way we live our life reveals our loyalties and the objects of our devotion—it is either “Christ or cul...

The article of opinion I am referring to is found here : Ms. Stepp states that youth are doing better on every line but one. Less teenage pregnancy, less drinking and driving, less smoking, less firearm related deaths, less suicides, but today's kids are fatter. "A lot fatter" states Stepp. But ask anyone over 40, she says, and they will by majority state that today's youth are NOT doing better. Stepp states kids wonder why parents don't pay any attention to them unless they get in trouble. I can surely attest to that. One of the older youth stopped by for a visit one night and i asked him if he'd like to stay for supper. He said sure. I told him he better call his parents first. He said, "They don't care...as long as I stay out of trouble they really don't care what I do." Sad. Stepp says it is about time we start catching kids doing right! How many of us would say "AMEN!" to that? Stepp barks, "Isn't it time we sh...

Some thoughts after reading this insert from Andy's, "Culture Making" webpage... The culture of each building, and the culture of the more abstract sphere they represent—retail, water treatment, banking, undergraduate education, and so on—has its own history of making and remaking, of possibility and impossibility. Many things that are entirely possible in a cafeteria—say, a food fight—are all but impossible in a dentist’s office, and vice versa. —Culture Making, p.44 ...I thought about Ken Davis' imagery in his comedy acts. One of which he tells about a moment when he is sharing a certain style of comedy with kids--something to the effect that halfway through a story he blurts out a loud yell and makes them jump, elbow each other, laugh and point at each other... Ken then states you get quite a different reaction if you do the same thing at a nursing home. Somehow painting an image in peoples' minds is an art. How to juxtapose two created images and make...

A reaction to Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, 2nd ed. 2005. This was a great book to have read prior to many others and is very foundational to the development of the rest of my thoughts for a course in my doctoral training… and for life. I truly appreciated not only the style and manner this book was written but the biblical scholarship is very solid. I don’t agree with the author’s assessment of consecration (I believe we consecrate and God sanctifies). God won’t sanctify what we don’t consecrate. Consecrating is our setting aside those things that are to be holy. Nevertheless, I have actually vocalized what this book has taught on a couple of occasions—it is that formative and conceptualizing to me. The creation of God was declared ‘good’ and so are the laws God put into place to govern His creation. Those laws haven’t changed but we do need discover them and “have dominion over them”. This is what true science is sup...

A reaction to David F. Wells, The Courage to be Protestant: Truth-Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World, 2008. “This disappearing trick [of the church] would never have been possible if evangelicals were still thinking in doctrinal terms. But they were not” (11). When you come across someone who is putting into writing the same things you yourself have been thinking it is rather exciting and serious business. The dissonance I felt during the “seminar movement” and their after effects producing little if any results is unnerving. I wonder if the foundational elements of the author are valid or are simply his perspective--so I am cautious of embracing them. We need to have “the courage to be faithful to what Christianity in its biblical forms has always stood for across the ages” (21). The author writes with great clarity of the dangers presented in society and how believers have been so enculturated in our thoughts and beliefs. He calls us to have the courage t...