Culture Briefs

Virtual pastor

“Most Sunday mornings at Buckhead Church in downtown Atlanta, one person is conspicuously absent: the senior pastor, Andy Stanley. A nationally known evangelist, Stanley is usually 20 minutes away at North Point Community Church, the suburban megachurch he has led for 13 years. To the 6,000 or so faithful at Buckhead, he appears only on video, his digital image projected in front of the congregation in life-sized 3-D. The preacher is a hologram.

“As the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this summer, American megachurch pastors are starting up video-based branches overseas to spread their faith, and their faces, to places where evangelical Christianity is just taking hold, using Starbucks as their model for rapid expansion.

“But here at home, where houses of worship are already as plentiful as suburban strip centers, the same strategy of high-tech franchising is emerging, despite objections from many Christians that it’s the wrong way to reach new converts.”

-Andrew Park, writing on “The Chick-fil-A Church,” on Aug. 15 at Slate

Side by side

“Though most of the book [“Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture”] is spent rummaging around in the periphery of American Christianity´s pop universe, [Daniel] Radosh concludes his adventure not by reprimanding the extremist, but by raving about the centrists who are as shocked as he is by his discoveries. In fact, rather than advocating for the annihilation of Christian pop culture, Radosh actually calls for a more complete intersection of the mainstream evangelical subculture with the larger American pop culture. …

“Radosh is so impressed by some Christian rock, Christian literature, and the Christian desire to participate as equals in American pop culture, that he wants to see this segment of the subculture adopted by the larger one … like an amusement park caricature of John the Baptist: calling for a repentance of the sacrilegious junk at hand, while proclaiming a better pop culture to come. …

“The greatest lesson in the book is not in what Radosh says with words but what he teaches by way of his tremendous example. If Christians treated American pop culture with the same respectful criticism and discerning openness that Radosh employed when examining the evangelical universe - neither rejecting nor accepting everything - these two cultures could have a productive encounter. Krystal Lewis and Kelly Clarkson could teach each other some new rhythms. Dan Rupple and David Letterman could slip each other some new jokes. Dan Brown and Jerry B. Jenkins could swap some writing tips.”

-Kristen Scharold, writing on “Are you Ready?” on Aug. 14 at the First Things blog On the Square

Top-down model

“Aside from Ireland every instance of Christianity spreading and absorbing a culture in Europe after the fall of Rome was initiated from the top and down. Though most of these states had small Christian minorities, sometimes of influence, the majority of the logistic growth curve occurred while Christianity was the official religion.

“Many Protestants even contend that Christianization of the European peasantry was not completed until after the Reformation. But there were strong incentives to become a pious Christian in Europe after 1000, when Christianity and civilization and elite status went hand in hand, and paganism was tantamount to barbarism.”

-Razib, writing on “Historical Dynamics and contingent conditions of religion,” on Aug. 6 at the Science Blogs site Gene Expression