It's time for another excerpt from The Liberated Imagination!
"In its broadest reaches, this is a book about culture. My focus will be on art, music, and literature, but what I say about these particular cultural manifestations usually applies to culture more generally...
How can Christians relate human culture to their faith? This is obviously a task of integration... I have no doubt that such an integration is both possible and necessary for every thoughtful Christian; it may even be the most pressing issue facing the Christian church in the immediate future. If Christians are to be a force in shaping the contours of their society and evangelizing people in it, they will have to come to grips with the culture in which they inevitably live and move and have their being...
The question that has perennially engaged Christians is not whether culture requires their attention, but how it does. Christian thinking on the question has moved between the poles of total rejection and total affirmation of culture...neither extreme does justice to the biblical data...
To think Christianly about culture and the arts means to look at them through the 'lens' of biblical doctrine."
* * *
I'm in a season of life where I'm not interacting with the lost world around me quite as much, but in the interactions I do have, it is so easy to connect with strangers over books, music, movies, or television. Wouldn't you agree? Everyone is impacted by these mediums (unless they cut themselves off entirely), and knowing what is shaping a person's life gives you a better understanding of them as you begin to speak truth into their lives.
Here's a little post I wrote last year after reading the popular
series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I think it illustrates
one way of reading while looking through the "lens of biblical doctrine."
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