Living in an “Un-Serious” Culture

daily_commentary_11_03_15Our friends at the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview have produced an excellent commentary on the “unseriousness” of our culture.

John Stonestreet notes,

“At any given moment, what’s most likely to cause social media outlets like Twitter to explode isn’t a humanitarian crisis, a natural disaster, or a critical political issue—it’s a celebrity feud or some other pop culture story.

“Surveying our cultural landscape, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the defining characteristic of modern Western culture, at least in the United States, is that it is unserious. Now, by ‘un-serious’ I don’t mean that we should walk around with a furrowed brow and only talk about Kierkegaard or nineteenth-century German Romanticism. What I’m referring to is the nihilism of what German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘last men,’ apathetic creatures without any great passions or commitments.”

You can read Stonestreet’s entire commentary here, or listen to it below.

[audio:http://www.breakpoint.org/images/content/breakpoint/audio/2015/110315_BP.mp3|titles=Caring About Small Things and Overlooking Big Things]

What’s Up With Halloween These Days?

512px-Friendly_pumpkinRecently we published a blog post asking “Why is There No ‘War on Halloween’?

The post was intended to highlight an inconsistency among many modern atheists: They are all-too-eager to attack the spiritual elements depicted in public Christmas decorations, but they are reluctant to attack the spiritual elements depicted in public Halloween decorations.

The post has turned out to be very popular, and I thought it would be fitting to follow it up with another more general question: What’s up with Halloween these days?

What’s Up With Halloween?

I’m not interested in bashing Halloween itself, per se, with this blog post. Many Christians consider Halloween an overtly satanic holiday; that’s a topic I would just as soon save for another day. I’m more interested in looking at what Halloween has become these past few years–and what it says about us as Americans. (more…)