Culture Vulture Round Up For May 16th

I had a great evening at Russ Matthews’ book launch. His wife Cathy gave a public reading of one of the chapters.

A lot of good articles and events get under your radar. This week there have been some crackers that I think would be helpful to read.

Reel Marriage Book Launch

First up, my wife Jill and I attended the book launch of film critic, Russ Matthews’ new book, Reel Marriage, at a delightful little cafe and bookstore in the inner Sydney suburb of Paddington, called Ampersand. It’s worth a coffee and cake and a browse at the very least., It’s super quaint. A lovely quiet space.  Russ’s book is an excellent story of a marriage in strife, and a gospel encounter mediated through movies, that leads to its recovery.

I was honoured to write the foreword for the book, and to speak on the night, while Russ’s wife Cathy read one of the chapters. It was a nice touch having a book written by a man with alternate chapters from the voice of the husband and then the voice of the wife. My own wife thought it was deftly done. Russ writes well.  You can purchase Reel Marriage here while, just as importantly, there’s a guidebook for Reel Marriage also, as it doubles as a resource for Christians to understand how better to use film’s narrative arcs in their everyday evangelism.

AI is our Terminator Too?

Second, a rather disconcerting interview (both audio and full transcript) between The New York Times’ Ross Douthat and someone described in the headline as “the herald of the apocalypse. Which apocalypse? The impending Artificial Intelligence one that is!  And that might arrive sooner than we think.  One thing is for sure, things are set to change for us mere mortals. But how soon and in which direction?

Slow White: A non-reactionary response

Amy Ward, who has been a guest writer on my own blog, and who has a keen eye on popular culture especially movies,  had this piece on the new Snow White on her Substack. Okay, it’s been a few months since the hype and the hate, but in the cool light of day, what is an even-handed approach? And what is a gospel response?  Amy unpacks both after a visit to the cinema with her eight year old daughter.

The Irony Age is Over

A great piece in Mere Orthodoxy about the – thankfully – demise of the ironic age: Preaching the Gospel to People Sick of Irony. Here we are in post-irony with people starving for sincerity and kindness. What does that mean about our preaching? What does that mean about the spirit behind our preaching? I found this statement most challenging:

Pastors who feel like natives in postmodernity (Gen X, and aging Millennials in particular) must learn to rebel against their old impulses. I believe this means sincerity, enthusiasm, and an unembarrassed proclamation of the power of God. We must be less Driscoll, and more like John Piper. There is nothing impressive about his appearance. To the postmodern mind he is naive, and silly. But a metamodern context will be open to a form of informed naivety that is much more comfortable with Piper’s style of raw, enthusiastic, single-entendre preaching style.

Virtuous Protestantism

And this piece from Catholic journal First Things by the erudite (and very Protestant) Carl Trueman. First Things is, btw, my favourite public theology publication. Carl states:

The challenges are immense, but orthodox Protestants can and must start to think about virtue, what it is, and what pedagogical strategies will help to cultivate it. On the former, a return to Thomas is overdue. Orthodox Protestant theology has benefited immensely from re-engaging with the actual theology of the men behind the creeds many of us recite each week..But we cannot stop at the mere retrieval of the idea of virtue. Catholicism has had Thomas for centuries but there is no evidence that Catholics are on the whole living more virtuous lives than Protestants.

My Subscriber Substack

And of course, my Substack is up and running as a parallel enterprise. I’ve just commenced a series on “Christian Craft” – exploring how we rebuild a culture that has gone to seed, but doing so in the same slow, meticulous and focussed manner craftsmen and craftswomen ply their trade. We didn’t get into the cultural mess we are in overnight, and we won’t get out of it overnight.

Why do we need Christian Craft?:

In the same way, in a world of screen-apps and screen-taps; a world of swiping left and right, of commodification outsourcing, and virtual sex, with the promise of even more realistic virtual sex to come, the quiet craft of culture repair seems almost quaint.The church has been viewed in the same vein as that 1920s Sydney relic, a building past its use-by-date, that has been superseded first by self-help, then by self-construction, then self-deconstruction and then finally by self-loathing as the self-reconstruction mode refuses to kick in.

You can read that here if you’re a first timer on my Substack, but I’d love you to sign up for the cost of a coffee per month as I continue to write long form on another platform. Your support greatly helps me as I seek to undertake my own slow craft of helping build up God’s people in the West in these complex times.

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For some reason the links are not coming up in different font at the moment on my blog. I have “bolded” the links along with book and blog titles, so hover over the text and the links will come up.