All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes

I'm currently reading All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes by Kenneth A. Myers. Three chapters in and I can say without a doubt I'm going to love this book. Here are a few favorite quotes from the first three chapters that highlight the idea of deliberateness and why examining popular culture is important.

It [Popular Culture] unobtrusively provides the backdrop, scenery, costumes, minor characters, script, and background noise of much of our lives. When we arrive the stage is already set, the lyrics and music written, our lines and our movements already determined.  Popular culture has the power to set the pace, the agenda, and the priorities for much of our social and our spiritual existence, without our explicit consent. It requires a great effort not to be mastered by it. (p.xiv)

Each of us arises every morning with, in the providence of God, a number of duties, dilemmas, opportunities, and confusions that stem from living in a particular culture at a particular time. Our decisions about what sort of involvement with popular culture is prudent does not occur in isolation. Just as a critic cannot understand a song or a novel or a movie outside of its cultural context, so we cannot anticipate or evaluate the effect popular culture has on our lives without looking at that context. Do I want to read that book because everyone else is reading it, or because of some intrinsic merit it has? Am I turning on the television because there is something I want to watch, or because I am addicted to distracting titillation? (p.31)

Culture...is the result of billions of separate choices by millions of people...Rarely if ever is the condition of a culture the product of deliberate decision...(p.32)

What we find beautiful or entertaining or moving is rooted in our spiritual life. (p.27)

I hope you'll consider putting this book on your to-read list for this year. I plan on writing a review when I've finished it, but as I'm trying to exagorazo time in my life this year, I'm not going to write a summary of each chapter. If you are interested, Brandi at Afterthoughts wrote a series of posts on All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes a few years ago and I'm sure you'll enjoy them as much as I am.