We live in the first truly self-creating culture. You can actually make a whole new you. In the past, people were known by their relationships. Our last names are themselves family ties, suggesting that your […]
Category: Culture
The gospel according to Sufjan Stevens
It’s Holy Week — the week leading up to Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter — and Sufjan Stevens has dropped a new album. He couldn’t have timed its release any better, for the album […]
Daniel, his friends & how to deal with culture
Daniel is best known for dealing with lions. He did. But just once. What he dealt with a lot was the new culture he found himself in, once he and his friends were dragged off […]
Smuggling the truth
I came across the following quote by movie director Danny Boyle from way back in 2005 in a great interview with Jeffrey Overstreet: “… you’ve got to be, like Scorsese says, ‘cunning.’ You’ve got to […]
238 miles of ABBA & the death of creativity
It took him more than five hours to drive to Chicago, during which time he listened to “Dancing Queen” by ABBA about 100 times in a row, stopping only for gas and other essential duties. […]
Is humanity redeemable? Snowpiercer vs. Jesus
Occasionally, a movie will stick with me for weeks and months afterward. Sometimes, it’s a movie like Frozen with its tenacious “Let It Go” song, which won’t do what it suggests. Then there are movies of […]
Are we living in bad times or good times?
One of the worst parts of using Facebook is seeing all of the articles people post whining about how bad things are these days. It doesn’t matter what your political leaning is, there is plenty […]
Eating as education
So, they decided to serve chocolate milk at my son’s elementary school again. They’d stopped. But now they’re at it again. The reason? Kids didn’t like the regular milk as much. I get it. Kids […]
Facebook and the story of your life.
The Facebook experience has been analyzed from pretty much every angle. But there’s one angle that I’ve yet to come across and that’s Facebook’s role in creating a personal narrative. With every post, every person […]
Equality: a poor substitute for love
When our culture treats one group of people badly, we seek justice through attempts at making a level playing field for everyone. At such times, these attempts at equality are necessary and helpful. But that’s […]