Week 3 Reso, Evalu, Analy

Left Behind 3
Wow… so how’s this for a media shift… this movie is being released on DVD only, and then screened in CHURCHES instead of theaters. What do you think of this shift if it becomes a trend?

Fearless Faith
This is a great book that I think helps us think about Media and Culture from a Christian sub-culture perspective. Or rather, challenging the Christian sub-culture’s perspective. The book by John Fischer is entitled Fearless Faith: Living Beyond the Walls of “Safe” Christianity. This link is from Fischer’s web-site, and has a first-chapter excerpt from the book. Check it out.

More John Fischer
An article from Fischer (originally in CCM magazine) that fits some of what our group discussed in class today about the high ideals of creativity and artistic integrity and how quickly that can be usurped by the powers and practices at play in the Entertainment Industry in the U.S.

Roaring Lambs
Roaring Lambs: A Gentle Plan To Radically Change Your World. Another one of the books I mentioned to my group in class the other day… Bob Briner was the president of ProServ Television and an Emmy winning TV producer… and a Christian who wrote this book as a “manifesto of our proper stance regarding the ‘culture-shaping arena”, arguing that “Christians can and ought to be the movers and shakers of social change.” He applies it particularly to Media and the Arts and other areas he saw as “culture-shaping arena” that Christians have not had much presence or influence in.

The 500 Year Delta
This book is quoted in Fischer's Fearless faith book, so I only know that part of it that applies to Fischer's book, but they way Fischer references it, he talks about it as being "one of the first books to talk about the vast changes facing society [in the near future]." They suggest that what society is heading toward is the deliniation "of the current splintering of the social, political, and economic organization of society into what they call "media communes." And they identify one of those separate groups as "God Talk," the Christian "media commune. We are relegated to our own separate niche, being marketed to and sold to based on our "demographic," but without any effective crossover into the rest of society and life. That certainly does not bode well for Christian interaction and engagement with the rest of culture, and that in effect means Media, as a power and structure in this world, will have pushed the Church a safe distance away from the rest of culture. Yikes!