I am naturally enthusiastic about art and culture so, even though I taught a module on 'Human personhood in contempory art' last year, I have had to learn to be more cautious and have become suspicious of an over eager interpretation of popular art. It is too easy to look for confirmation of ones own beliefs in the media... e.g. interpreting the Matrix as Christian messianic parable. I have heard many people say a film or song is good because it mentions Jesus or has some echo of a Christian message e.g. Puff Daddy. So I am cautious of doing what Romanowski subtilties his book Eyes wide open - 'Looking for God in popular culture' if it means trying to find something I agree with or is sympathetic to my world view in a piece of art/entertainment... But as Romanowski says...
...popular art provides stories, symbols, images, metaphors, and melodies that depict cultural values and assumptions, behavioral norms, social and gender roles. In this way, the popular arts mediate between culture and life, that is, our cultural conceptions and our social and environmental realities.
So popular art may offer us some insights to the contemporary human condition, but believing in a universal story that is simply outside of Church is unrealistic, Seyla Benhabib says...
Transcendental guarantees of truth are dead; in the agonal struggle of language games there is no commensurability; there are no criteria of truth transcending local discourses, but only the endless struggle of local narratives vying with one another for legitimation.
There are as many truths, searches, questions as there are stories... we cannot appropriate culture, nor read our story into anothers. What we can do is look for signs of searching... the Matrixists and the Jedi may tell us about some peoples yearning for spiritual meaning, association and a need to belong. Lets be honest though forming religions was not the intention of the film makers... asking contemprary, timeless questions may have been. It seems to me to more important to listen for the questions in art than look for any answers...
Ok so I am not keen on "using" popular culture to teach a message that simply isn't there in the art... that seems to me to lack integrity... nor should we classify art as bad or good in terms of how much it agrees with me... but love it and listen to it as Anton Karl Kozlovic writes (link from Phil Johnson - cheers)
Turning ones’ back on popular culture in an Ostrich-like fashion is also unnecessary and unwise. Why? Because popular film is a cultural touchstone and an intellectual legacy that should be proactively employed as a legitimate product of the 20th (and now 21st) century. It is also an effective means of social empowerment. Indeed, to “ignore popular culture is to allow it to act upon us blindly. To reflect upon it critically allows us to make choices” (Forbes, 2003, p. 245). Therefore, religionists need to go forward, not backwards in meeting the challenges of the future. As Ian Maher (2002, p. 5) succinctly put it: “Christians cannot afford to be out of touch with popular films if they are to remain in touch with the swirling currents of contemporary society.” Or as Don C. Richter (2001, p. 76) more colourfully put it: “being Christian does not remove us from the world like some Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie.” Ernest L. Simmons (2003, p. 254) came to the same essential conclusion. He argued that: “For many people today, especially the young, popular culture is culture, and theology, to remain true to its calling, must take such cultural expressions seriously.”
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