Christ and Pop Culture

The Heisman Trophy Trust is expected to strip former University of Southern California star running back Reggie Bush of college football’s top honor by the end of September, sources told Yahoo! Sports.

Bush would become the first player in the 75-year history of the award to have the trophy taken away. The NCAA found major violations in the Trojans’ football program in June and levied serious sanctions against the school.

Two sources close to the Heisman trust said the body’s investigation is coming to a close, and will ultimately concur with the NCAA’s determination that Bush was ineligible during his Heisman-winning season in 2005. Because of that independent conclusion, sources said the trust will relieve Bush of the award and leave the honor for that season vacant.

I hope this is actually true–it is my suspicion that USC is not the only program in the country making such gross violations and programs will continue to make such violations and players will continue to accept such outlandish “gifts” until the NCAA starts becoming equally severe in its punishments. Here is an instance where if the Heisman Trophy Trust actually sticks to their guns–they will be sending a powerful message to the NCAA and the sporting world–cheating will not be tolerated and consequences for doing so are severe.  Sorry Mr. Bush, you won’t be invited to the Heisman Trophy Presentation Show ever again–because you are not a Heisman Trophy Winner–because you broke the rules and therefore are no longer eligible to hold the title of College Football’s best player.

Perhaps baseball and cycling will learn a lesson from this as well–people are always going to look to cheat–that is human nature, but the problem will escalate unless the punishments begin to fit the crimes.  Here is to hoping that other sports might follow the Heisman Trophy Trust’s example and start erasing names off the record books and some integrity would return to the world of sports!

If you’ve played and enjoyed Bioshock 2 (that means you, Drew), you may be lamenting the fact that though the story ended beautifully, the story ended. If you bought the sequel, you probably share with me a love for Rapture as a place and the Bioshock series as an examination of human lives in the face of nonexistent moral boundaries. Or whatever. Maybe you just like the dynamic combat system, cause that’s pretty awesome too.

Either way, I’m going to recommend Minerva’s Den, Bioshock 2′s $10 single player downloadable content, as highly as I possibly can. The DLC is actually an entirely new story about an entirely new character, who finds himself thrust into a situation he doesn’t understand. If this seems like a pattern, it’s not just a tired Bioshock cliche – it’s the nature of Rapture. In this place, people use other people for their own purposes and people are kept in the dark. Because the only person you can trust is yourself, shared information is scarce and even when available it is untrustworthy.

Anyway, that’s Rapture. This small slice of one man’s life, though, is fascinating, engrossing, and moving. All that, and it speaks volumes about ourselves, our own longings, and our own desires to control our own fates and the fates of those close to us.

Also, there’s some sweet new Plasmids and a crazy big laser gun.

There’s a large contingent out there that refused to play the sequel to Bioshock because they considered the story of Rapture to be closed. I disagree, because to me Rapture is a place where people lived. While Bioshock told the story of the leader of Rapture, Bioshock 2 and Minerva’s Den show us that there are other people who are less pronounced and less officially important. Nonetheless, they have stories to tell and we have something to learn from them.

At Books & Culture, Betty Smartt Carter’s “The Good Man Philip and the Scoundrel Pullman” is an amusing summary of Philip Pullman’s career, written as a semi-parody of the Grand Idea of his recent novel (The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ), in which twins named “Jesus” and “Christ” (so, one was Jewish and one was Greek, and one got a real name and one got a title?) get to embody the qualities that Philip Pullman does and doesn’t like, respectively, about the Jesus of the Bible.

I haven’t read Pullman’s latest, since I lost any appetite for Pullman after The Amber Spyglass (the third volume of the His Dark Materials trilogy), but one of the things I like about Carter’s parable is that it captures the sense of initial intrigue (mixed with a little uneasiness) that many readers experienced when starting His Dark Materials, followed by disappointment as Pullman’s engaging writing style was overcome by his need to “preach” his particular beliefs about the church and God. It looks like that trend has only continued.

As I mentioned the dust-up between Jim Wallis and Marvin Olasky a little bit ago, I thought I’d give this quick update. Wallis has since apologized to Olasky for saying that he lies for a living, saying he should never speak such words about “a brother in Christ.” He also asked for Olasky’s forgiveness. Olasky responded that he was glad to talk to Wallis and happy to see Christians following Matthew 18 in resolving conflict.

After being pretty rough on his first comments, I thought Wallis deserved another post to praise his willingness to admit where he spoke wrongly and viciously. His latter actions are much more in keeping with the kind of discourse that should occur between Christians who share Christ but maybe not every theological/political understanding. I hope many more Christians, left and right, will look to this as a pretty good example of what to do when such differences tempt us to act in ungodly ways.  We may not be able to agree but we can show how to disagree lovingly.

Today over at foul-mouthed but entertaining and insightful video-game related web-comic, Penny Arcade, there’s a comic and discussion about the ethical issues surrounding used games. Writer, Jerry Holkins (or Tycho), did an excellent job of boiling the issue down to its’ fundamentals:

In a literal way, when you purchase a game used, you are not a customer of theirs. If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can’t figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous.

…I traded in games for a long time, there’s probably comics somewhere in the archive about it – you can imagine how quickly my cohort and I consume these things. It was sort of like Free Money, and we should have understood from the outset that no such thing exists. You meet one person who creates games for a living, just one, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this virtuous fiction.

It is an argument that can be applied to pretty much any medium. Whether it’s a movie, album, or the Complete Lost Series DVD set, if you’re borrowing or buying used, you’re not really supporting that product in any tangible way. At first glance, it’s a pretty compelling argument for buying new whenever possible, but after thinking about it for a bit it seems a little bit like a double edged sword.

The truth is, there are some games, movies, etc. that we watch, engage with, but just aren’t crazy about. It’s not that we wish the developer evil. We don’t want them to be fired, but we also aren’t crazy about them getting rich off of it. I’m thinking about things like: Modern Warfare 2, Transformers the Movie, and even stuff like Sunday School Musical.

Generally, I want to reward aesthetic risk, thoughtful plot, genuine characters, and fair-minded critique in all of the media I take in. This is why I’ll never sell games like Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, or Bioshock 2 back to Gamestop, and why I’ll be buying the next thing their developers do on day one. Borderlands, Battlefield: Bad Company? Eventually, those games will find themselves on Amazon, ready to be snatched up for cheap by someone who will also be decidedly uninterested in rewarding games that are good and all, but probably a little overrated and over rewarded in the grand scheme of things.

This week Judge Royce Lamberth of the District Court for Washington, DC, issued a temporary injunction halting the enforcement of President Obama’s stem-cell executive order from last year. If you do not recall, this order reversed President Bush’s ban on using human embryos for such research. I spoke to President Obama’s decision and reasoning on CAPC last year and will not rehearse those arguments again. However, I do think this ruling is worth noting.

The decision is based on statutory interpretation and not Constitutional. In non-legal jargon, the judge based his reasoning on examining a particular law and not by looking to a principle in the Constitution. The specific law in question is the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, a bill banning research on human embryos that either destroys them or subjects them to tests not allowed on unborn children in the womb. This amendment passed as part of the funding bill for Health and Human Services in 1996 and continues to be added unchanged to the agency’s appropriations bill each year.

The statutory instead of Constitutional basis of the injunction means the course of this case is unlikely to comprise a major shift in how we legally consider human life pre-birth; that is, unless another court decides to take up the Constitutional issues involved. The injunction does give us in the public another opportunity to discuss the crucial issue of the nature of human life—what is it and when does it begin? Specifically, why would a ban on destroying human embryos in research be approved rather easily year after year? What moral claims does it make in the ban and are they legitimate?

This issue deserves our continued focus as we try to build a God-honoring ethic for it. The stakes are high for a wrong choice.

I’m curious as to how many of our readers watch the newish History Channel program, “Chasing Mummies.” It features Egyptologist Zahi Hawass as he takes a team to explore mummies and their crypts in the land of the Pharaohs.

The show seems to expose in rather dissonant fashion the tension if not outright contradiction the History Channel tries to maintain nowadays for ratings purposes. On one hand, the show explains a good bit of actual discoveries regarding ancient Egypt and their religious/political/social practices. Egypt, as one of the world’s oldest civilizations, shows itself to be far from exhausted as a topic of research during the episodes of this show.

On the other hand, however, we find in Hawass a focus on entertaining personality. Much of the show’s kick appears to be Hawass yelling at his crew, firing interns, and self-consciously making combinations of grandiose statements of congratulatory self-assessment and impossible demands of those around him. The show is considered interesting to gape at the demands, gasp at the insults, and laugh at the grandstanding. In many ways, these techniques appear little different than the rather vapid programming dominating the former music channels, MTV and VH1. We watch for the exhilaration of vicarious horrifying, disturbing, or just plain weird experiences.

That the History Channel would so brazenly and awkwardly combine these two components seems to either be poor marketing or a pretty desperate attempt to reach two very different audiences; or maybe it takes watchers to be somewhat obtuse. Regardless, the show’s posturing to reality-like personality programs dilutes its better moments. The beauty and vanity, strength and weakness, longevity and fleetingness of Egypt become too often a backdrop for that which is only vanity, weakness, and fleeting. For all of its interesting research, the show fails both to emulate and to properly consider that which is noble and beautiful. With Egypt as a backdrop, such a failure has little excuse.

I’ve always found Jim Wallis unimpressive. My first encounter came when he spoke at my undergrad university in 2006. Recently, Marvin Olasky criticized Wallis for not admitting his political leanings, which if you’ve read God’s Politics or his many other publications you will quickly see are left of center. Olasky himself admitted that he is conservative, interprets in part through that lens, and thinks openness about such biases is helpful and honest. Knowing the general premises’ of a commentator allows the listener/reader to better understand what about his/her statements are fair representations and what partakes of evasive partisanship. I agree with Olasky’s general call. Be honest about where you come from politically. Both can be Christians but we must admit our reading of Bible is not the only cultural influence.

Further, Olasky points out that Wallis’s magazine Sojourners, has accepted money from George Soros, whose other financial contributions include $5 million to MoveOn.org and $10 to America Coming Together. This statement was made merely to reinforce Olasky’s argument about Wallis’ un-admitted point-of-view. Soros does not give to religious organizations to spread the Gospel any more than Tea Partiers try to recruit Church-goers to fulfill the Great Commission. He gives to progressive groups arguing for a progressive program.

All of that was really introduction, for there is nothing wrong with having a political point-of-view or with accepting financial help. But the troubling part of this story is Wallis’ reaction. When asked about Olasky’s comments, Wallis replied “”It’s not hyperbole or overstatement to say that Glenn Beck lies for a living.  I’m sad to see Marvin Olasky doing the same thing.  No, we don’t receive money from Soros.”

Not only was this mean-spirited; not only was it in the same spirit of the Beck’s and Limbaugh’s he claims to be above; it was blatantly untrue. The next day Sojourners admitted to taking money from Soros. Did Wallis then apologize for not just calling Olasky a liar but saying lying is his form of making a living? No. Instead he says, “”I should have declined to comment until I was able to review the [Olasky] blog post in question and consulted with our staff on the details of our funding over the past several years. Instead, I answered in the spirit of the accusation and did not recall the details of our funding over the decade in question.” 

Not only did he not apologize for calling the truth a lie; he insinuates his mistatement/untruth was provoked by Olasky’s statement of the truth.

He also pleaded justified ignorance of the donations, because “OSI [Soros group]made up the tiniest fraction of Sojourners’ funding during that decade–so small that I hadn’t remembered them.” From 2004-2007 Soros gave no less than $325,000 to Sojourners.

However legitimate his accusations against Glen Beck (which are much closer to the truth than his childish comparison to Olasky), Wallis should perhaps seek to remove the log from his own eye before performing other-focused operations. The upstart religious left is proving to be little different in spirit than the worst offenses of the religious right they so furiously attack.

In my last post, I made casual mention of the fact that video games are becoming more varied, and I wanted to explain a little bit more about what that means.

In short, it means there’s a game for you. Yes, you.

Probably the largest segment of people I know of who have drifted away from games claim they are too complicated or require too much inherent skill. For those people, here are some games that I can recommend, and an explanation as to why the average “non-gamer” would enjoy them:

• Peggle (PC/Mac/iPhone/Xbox Live Arcade/Playstation Network) – Simply aim and shoot. You’ll find yourself unable to look away as that ball makes a seemingly random path toward the bottom of the screen. At first, it may seem that the game requires no skill at all and is based on nothing but blind luck, but if you stick with it, you’ll find yourself strategizing with the best of them, and loving it! Try the duel mode with a friend or loved one for maximum benefit. (Check out my overly profound write-up of this game)
• Limbo (Xbox Live Arcade) – If you’re looking for something simple, but a little more substantial, check out Limbo with a mind toward the artful. My best advice for how to most enjoy this game? Speculate. Speculate as to where this boy is, what he’s feeling, and why the things that are happening to him are indeed happening to him. The game will never answer your questions, but your own answers will probably be better anyway.
• Portal (PC/Mac/Xbox Live Arcade) – It’s the best way to familiarize yourself with First Person Shooter controls. It’s slow paced, and contains no violence whatsoever. It also contains a story that may even make you question yourself and the way you think about and brush off relationships.

Those are just three games that require very little agility and button memorization, but that also provide an extremely rewarding experience. They also provide a pretty wide view of what’s possible with the medium when it’s at it’s best.

We here at CaPC spend a lot of time talking the whos, whats, and hows of pop culture. All of that talk is governed by the when (that is, now…certainly not yesterday), and the where (the West). But we don’t talk a lot about the why.

Murray Jardine, a political science professor at Auburn University, would like to help us with that. In The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society he explores the development of contemporary Western culture, which he describes as a “consumer culture” and a “market society”, and explains why pop culture had come about:

Put simply, if several generations of people diligently practicve the [secularized Protestant] work ethic, the eventual result will be a highly productive society…But then that highly productive society faces a very large problem: putting it crudely, somebody has to buy all that stuff!

…[Then,] as the aesthetic ethos of consumerism relentlessly increases the pace of life in capitalist societies, people must consume more and more services…this consumption includes everything from routine automobile maintenance to clothes. For all its obsession with personal “choice,” consumer culture offers little real choice about consuming; the only way to avoid copious consumption is quite literally to drop out of society.

Jardine compares our understanding of culture, creativity, morality, and freedom with a Biblical perspective that brings a new way of thinking and a new understanding of our place before God.

If you’re interested, you can enter to win one of two copies: Book Giveaway: The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society.

Winners will be announced Saturday afternoon.

One of the surprising aspects of my (slow and only by God’s Grace) growth as a Christian is how often the Holy Spirit convicts me of mindsets that  I have taken up from my culture, mindsets that are so deeply rooted that it feels very uncomfortable for me to acknowledge them and change. I’d much rather be convicted about lying than a part of my foundational worldview any day. Changing part of the basic way you view the world is painful, and often feels wrong even when it is right. For example, in my time in churches and around Christians, I’m not sure I can ever remember anyone (myself included) praying for peace in global conflicts. We’d often pray for victory, or the safety of our troops, but not peace according to God’s will. It has taken me some time and thought to acknowledge that our ultimate desire in global conflicts and wars should be peace, as God wills it, not necessarily victory for our country. Years growing up in a patriotic (and at times nationalistic) culture (Christian and secular) allowed me to ignore the commands to pray for our enemies and be peacemakers.

I’m going through a similar experience right now as my wife and I listen to Tim Keller’s Ministries of Mercy, which ChristianAudio.com is giving away free this month. This book has been far, far more challenging to the way I view the Christian way and the world than my realization that we should pray for peace. Keller compellingly demonstrates, from Scripture, the centrality of our call to minister to the physical needs of our neighbors. So far, it has been a healthy corrective to the antinomianism of the conservative church (which has tended to put evangelism and the right to the “fruits of our labor” above our obligation to our neighbors) and the legalism of the liberal church (which has tended to make social justice into a law) by applying the Gospel. In the past, I have always been defensive when reading the many passages in Scripture that call us to care for and defend the poor and oppressed. Having been raised in a fairly conservative culture, social justice seemed like a watering down of the Gospel, or Liberal politics creeping into Christianity. It felt wrong, uncomfortable for me to acknowledge these passages for what they were: clear calls to live a radically different lifestyle than the consumerist culture around me.

Keller is also challenging my understanding of who my neighbor is. We all tend to shape our definition of “neighbor” so that it excludes those who we view as unworthy of our mercy. For some of us those might be the undeserving poor, a certain ethnic group, illegal aliens, Palestinians, addicts, those who have made poor financial decisions, the ugly, the old, or our enemies. With skillful and biblical precision, Keller cuts through these selfish excuses and forces us to see how God’s mercy to us should be a guide for our acts of mercy.

None of these realizations have been particularly comfortable for me, but they have been necessary. And they have reminded me of the fact that because we are communal creatures, our desires, loves, and visions of the world are dramatically shaped by our culture. And part of our maturity in Christ means that we must be willing to challenge our beliefs, even when it feels wrong to do so. Sometimes that even means challenging beliefs that we think are a part of our faith, like a “biblical” justification for why we can ignore the poor around us.

I essentially agree with the premise of this article that what makes video games such an interesting medium is the worlds that are created within.  Of the top few most memorable games I have played, I would say each presents a compelling, imaginative, or realistic world that kept me coming back again and again.  Yet, as Chris Dalen points out, there doesn’t seem to be a large emphasis on the building of the game world in the industry.  So with that said, here are a handful of memorable game worlds that are worth visiting:

1.  Bioshock 1 and 2 – I will never forget my first venture into Rapture–this world is a testament to the outcome of godlessness and human hubris.  The world is haunting and provides the necessary backdrop for one of the best plots I have ever played through.  The second installment is perhaps less chilling because we have been to Rapture before–but well done nonetheless.

2.  Half Life 1 and 2 – Black Mesa and the subsequent City 17 are fascinating places to visit–the amount of detail that was put into both of these games at the time at which they were released is astounding and the result is a mysterious world that kept me progressing through until the very end.

3.  Super Mario 64 – the playability of this games years after its release proves that a game doesn’t have to feel real to be worth visiting.  At the time of its release, Mario 64′s was a massive but familiar world that just never seemed to cease to be interesting.

4.  Red Dead Redemption –  What Rockstar excelled at in the world of RDR was building a truly ruthless wild west world complete with various types of wildlife, town ruffians, and vastly beautiful western landscapes.  I seriously could have played RDR for hours just riding around on my horse taking in the sites.

What game worlds do you find memorable or impressive–I just sort of came up with this list off the top of my head, I am certainly leaving out some gems–so drop a comment and let me know what game world you found compelling or interesting.

I’ve seen several references recently to the “Bechdel Test” for movies, including one last week in Christianity Today‘s Her.meneutics blog. If you’re not familiar with the Bechdel Test, it judges a movie’s portrayal of women based on three criteria:

1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man

I too want to see strong female characters on screen, and I’m glad the Bechdel Test calls attention in a pointed way to their shortage. However, like any arbitrary set of criteria (like, say, counting the number of profane words in a film), it has its limits. For example, I tend to relate to strong female characters who feel rather isolated from other women: a movie focused on this type of character might fail the Bechdel Test based on a technicality. Furthermore, the Bechdel Test doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue, which is the assumption that we have to create books or movies (or church, for that matter) in a particular way to woo men and women who are only interested in products catering to their own genders. (YA author Ben Jeapes describes this mindset in fiction as “the magic Harry-Ron-Hermione formula for pre-teen adventures of 2 boys to 1 girl. . . . This is because boys only want to read about boys whereas girls will read about either gender: so, you get a boy for the boys, a girl for the girls, and another boy to make up for the girl. Sad but true.” While this formula tends to be the norm for juvenile fiction, it seems publishers and movie studios have recently discovered that products targeted exclusively to adult women can, in fact, make money. I’m not sure this is an improvement, though. (See: Sex and the City, as well as most women’s Bible studies.)) It’s insulting to both men and women to assume such a narrow range of interests for either.

In the most reacent issue of Collide Magazine various church/ministry leaders (across various disciplines) were asked to list their favorite and most essential productivity tools. Naturally many listed their Mac Books, iPhones, and various software, apps, and programs they use on a daily basis. I’ve decided it would be fun to see what tools you all use. Here’s my list of “Weapons of Choice,” share yours.

1) Gourmet Coffee- I don’t function well, sometimes not at all, without a good cup of coffee to jump start my morning…and I do stress “good.”

2) iPad 32GB with WiFi- My iPad has become my new everything tool. It contains my calendar, my books, and various other items that I use on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. I take it everywhere and use it everywhere.

3) Facebook- This is my number one social connectivity tool. I stay in constant touch not simply with friends, but with ministry partners, congregation members, and recieve regular updates not simply on lives, but tasks and needs too.

4) Things App- This is my task organizer. It is the best app. I’ve found for helping me to keep up on all the things daily, weekly, and monthly that I have to do.

5) Google Apps.- Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Reader these are the tools of our staff which keep us all on the same page, organized, and interacting. I can think of nothing that is as far reaching and well structured to sync together as these apps are.

6) Kindle App- I love my Kindle app for iPad, I now have a stack of books and resources with me wherever I go and I don’t have to carry around a bag full of heavy texts. It has made mobile study an ease.

7) Mindjet App- Mind mapping is all the rage these days for organizing your thoughts and I too have found it a helpful way to brainstorm, organize, and outline ideas. This is my favorite app of its kind so far, though I confess to be far from overly familiar with them.

8) ESV Bible App- This is my prefered translation to read from at the moment and with this app on my iPad I have a Bible with me at all times. The app also allows for quick and easy word/sentence or text searches making the whole Bible accessible in seconds.

9) A Good Pen and Paper- For all my technophilia I still find a good pen and a notebook useful. I am not one of those suckers, however, who pays $140 bucks for a pen. I usually find a good Paper Mate and use it till it runs dry.

10) Vimeo.com- This is one of the best places to upload and watch videos. We use it at our church to host our Growth Group (small group) dvd lessons, and I’ve used to post other teachings for mass viewing. The site is easy to navigate and it allows you to upload materials without having to pay a hosting fee.

What I’ve been watching lately:

1) Arrested Development- I can’t believe I didn’t watch this show when it was originally aired, it is hilarious. But thanks to Netflix I am watching it now. We’ve finished season one and just begun season two and I can’t stop laughing.

2) Futurama- I am a sucker for Matt Groening and this show is quality work. The satire, the wit, and the sheer fun of this animated show make it worth rewatching. Again Netflix has allowed me to rewatch all of the original airings, and Comedy Central is showing new episodes, which are just as much fun.

3) Rugrats- Hey if you’ve got kids you’re going to have to watch kids shows, at least this way I get to watch shows that I thought were funny when I was a kid and not shows that I find obnoxious (i.e. Barney and Dora). God bless Netflix!

4) BBC’s Robin Hood- I love this version of the classic tale. It’s definately worth checking out.