Entertainment Theology: New-Edge Spirituality in a Digital Democracy (Cultural Exegesis)
Barry Taylor
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0801032377
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
It's the end of the church as we know it. In a digitally connected world, people are seeking spiritual answers through pop culture. Instead of retreating, Christians must "rethink the sacred" and enter global conversations about God--in film, literature, TV, and music--or face extinction, argues Barry Taylor in Entertainment Theology. Taking snapshots from theology, cultural studies, sociology, and pop culture, Taylor explores a myriad of factors affecting religious life since the 1970s, including technology, fashion, celebrity, and global communications. He exhorts a move away from traditional Christian religion, proposing instead a manifestation of Christianity as a religion not of the past but of the present and the future. For scholars, seminary students, culture watchers, and emerging-church readers, Entertainment Theology offers thought-provoking hope for Christianity's future.
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“human nature” at its most fundamental level.54 Plastic surgery, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, gene therapy, and a host of other scientific and technological developments are enabling contemporary society to press the definitions and horizons of what it means to be human. Graham summarizes the developments in post-human thinking and research into four major categories: the mechanization of the human and the technologization of the natural; the blurring of species boundaries; the blurring
exorcist, is handed back to the priests at the end of the film as if to say, “we don’t need you anymore, crisis over.” Once again, the church is presented as essentially unnecessary. Its role as an instrument of the secular state is to function as a supporter of the secular order, an added maintainer of domestic peace, but the peace it establishes is sterile. As the film ends, the dark-tinted window of the limousine carrying the priests back to their world slowly rises and seals them off from the
in which the notion of spirit is set free from old forms, and new incarnations and new images of the sacred are now possible. And it is fueled by emerging worldviews that offer different configurations of the human condition. Religion in the postsecular is not a collection of doctrinal statements about God, about “bums on seats and if you’re living in the West,” a critique of religion’s colonizing tendencies, as voiced by singer Mark Wallinger in his song “Always on My Mind.”22 Instead it “is
Western Culture The Implosion of Modernity and the Rise of the Postsecular Timeless Time Space—The Final Frontier? Corporeality: The Body Politic Corporeality and Authority Evolution Not Revolution The Decline and Rise of God: The Emergence of a Spiritual Society Everything Is Everything Emerging Global Culture and the Symbolic Universe of the Media Generation A Postmodern Ethic New-Edge Spirituality Part 2 New Edges Surface as Depth: Faith as Fetishization Shopping for God:
emerging context, namely, that of a “world come of age.”29 In other words, “The sacred establishes itself with respect to the profane.”30 In 1 Samuel 21:1–6 we encounter a moment of life-transforming crisis in the life of David. The future king is on the run from Saul’s charge of treason. Arriving harassed and hungry in the city of Nob, he seeks food from Ahimelech, the priest. The only food available is consecrated bread, reserved for those engaged in the service of God. The priest, desiring to