Ken Myers is the richly pleasing voice—and the far-ranging mind—behind the Mars Hill Audio Journal. He wrote a book in 1988 for Crossway’s Turning Point Christian Worldview Series, called All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes. I found it so profitable that I’m going to blog through it—mostly just providing good quotations.
Myers believes that “the challenge of living with popular culture may well be as serious for modern Christians as persecution and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries. Being thrown to the lions or living in the shadow of gruesome death,” he says are “fairly straightforward” threats. “But the erosion of character, the spoiling of innocent pleasures, and the cheapening of life itself that often accompany modern popular culture can occur so subtly that we believe nothing has happened” (xii-xiii).
One of the most helpful points I took from Myers’ book is his argument that “Christian concern about popular culture should be as much about the sensibilities it encourages as about its content” (xiii). He says pop culture “shapes how we think and feel (more than what we think and feel)” (xiii). Obviously, this theme in Myers book is inspired in part by Marshall McLuhan in books like The Medium is the Message.
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