When the Homily is about Immunology

Pop Culture

I ran across this quote recently and really found it insightful and I believe it may speak to us as Christians on a much more profound level – in the sense that we may be tempted to capitulate to “pop culture” and in so doing use music, books, and food to sell our faith. OR, worse yet, turn our Christianity literally into “pop culture” and abandon the more apropos (IMHO) “high” and “folk” culture.

Pop culture is the attempt to turn cultural artifacts—music, books, food—into commodities to sell and consume. Whereas high culture turns such things into works of art and whereas folk culture uses them to transmit traditional values, pop culture is interested primarily in selling them to a mass audience. This means that they must appeal to the lowest common denominator. They typically avoid being very demanding—which might exclude some consumers—preferring instead to offer "pure entertainment," often titillating the reader with sensationalism and the familiar "sex and violence." These works tend to follow an easily reproducible formula that has been found to attract customers.

Gene Veith, World Magazine, January 25, 2003

Now, you may – perhaps….umm hopefully – subtract the sex and violence aspect and still see the means by which we market the church. And whether we admit it or not, we are ALL marketing the Church…even us Orthodox – albeit without doing much in the realm of changing practices and such. But this topic is of lesser interest to me than what I was to discover below.

Having no idea who Gene Veith is, I did a web search to see if I could find any information about him. In so doing I found this article by him:
Postmodern Times, which although a little out of touch with the newest expressions of postmodern christianity that I have seen, is still an intriguing piece and has gotten me thinking.

I am currently working on a rather lengthy post, which may appear in parts. A working title:
Where the West is headed now, and how the Eastern Church might play a role