This Week: This week we talk about Revolutionary Road and the all-to-common (especially in Hollywood films) suburban existential crisis. Then, we discuss our online identities, whether it’s okay to put pictures of your baby online, and more. Good fun!
Every week, Richard Clark and Ben Bartlett sit back and discuss the posts of the previous week on Christ and Pop Culture, acknowledge and respond to the big issues in popular culture, and give a sneak peak at the week ahead. We love feedback! If you’d like to respond you can comment on the website, send an email to christandpopculture@gmail.com, or go to our contact page. We would love to respond to feedback on the show, so do it now! Subscribe to us in iTunes by clickinghere. While you’re at it, review us in iTunes! We’ll love you forever!
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Pop Culture is everywhere. We just acknowledge it. Christ and Pop Culture is an attempt to discuss and think rightly about the common knowledge of our age. 
As far as the criticism that the suburban life stifles living, I think the criticism is overblown and has been hammered incessantly for some time. There’s certainly truth to the warning against the level of consumerism that suburbia encourages, but it’s a criticism that most of us are pretty well aware of.
More interesting to me is the criticism that suburbia essentially arose out of misanthropy, selfishness, and a sense of privilege. Those with the means to do so, fled the squalor of the cities, segregating themselves from the less-washed bulk of society. In some ways this was a racist migration, whites abandoning urban centers to the ethnicities that made them uncomfortable.
There are a number of critical questions here:
• How should have reacted to such a migration?
• In what ways did such a move fracture society and what are the currently felt effects of this break?
• Now that this stratification of society has been well and fully accomplished, how then should Christians live within or without suburbia?
• What, if any, are the benefits of suburban sprawl?
• With the rise of suburbia, community and a sense of community fell on hard times. How do we begin to evaluate what suburbia does to encourage community?
• With its roots in self-centeredness and an abandonment of the egalitarianism of community via proximity, should we continue to view suburbia as merely a neutral? Is one’s place in suburbia vs. the city merely a question of location?
I don’t think suburbia necessarily stifles living, but I do think suburban living is littered with pitfalls and I wonder at the damage suburban living has perpetrated on the societal psyche. Especially in the church.
@Rich – It’s probably been a while since you’ve seen it, so I think you can be forgiven for this, but there is no critique of suburbia present in Pleasantville.
The Danes last blog post..20090417.teaParty