Tried With Fire

From www.dailypress.com Here's an interesting article about a local seeker-friendly church which made the front page of Friday's paper.  I think Neil Postman was right.

I finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (1931-2003). It is a thought-provoking book that puts forth the argument that television, with its use of images to convey information versus the printed word, has radically changed how we think, learn and assess what is true. Given that the book was published in 1985, you could substitute the Internet or any of the other technological wonders of the 21st century, and the argument would still be just as valid. Although Postman was a humanist, the book was helpful to me as a parent, home educator, and Christian, because we are charged to "not be conformed to this world." Therefore as a believer, I need to closely examine the effects of entertainment-driven technology, the very thing on which the world thrives. Yes, there are benefits from technology, but there are risks as well. The presence of technology has a pervasive and invasive presence in every part of our lives which may not always be a good thing, particul...

...[Jonathan] Edwards was one of the most brilliant and creative minds ever produced by America. His contribution to aesthetic theory was almost as important as his contribution to theology. His interests were mostly academic; he spent long hours each day in his study. He did not speak to his audiences extemporaneously. He read his sermons, which were tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions of theological doctrine. Audiences may have been moved emotionally by Edwards' language, but they were, first and foremost, required to understand it. If this preoccupation with literacy and learning be a 'form of insanity" as Coswell said of religious life in America, then let there be more of it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religious thought and institutions in America were dominated by an austere, learned, and intellectual form of discourse that is largely absent from religious life today. No clearer example of the difference between earlier and modern forms of...