This question was asked in one of my recent assignments for my Anthropology class. I would like to hear your response to it and to the other question that I got out of the first question.

1)    Is there such a thing as a “Christian Culture”?

My response:
The short answer is yes. Where there are people, there is culture. Most cultures are defined by religion, which in turn makes sense to have a Christian culture. I think the real question to ask is a Christian culture bad? And the answer to this question is it can be bad. “When a person has been raised in one culture as a Christian and enters another culture to bring the gospel, the person brings more than just the gospel. The person is bringing his or her cultural understanding of the gospel and cultural manifestation of it. In other words the gospel has been contextualized in the culture of the Christian” (Grunlan & Mayers 26). Contextualizing plagues the “Christian culture” the most. Contextualized can be defined as doing something inside a system, forming ideology inside a set system. There are all kinds of systems set up, and ideologies inside these systems. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Where it gets to be a problem for the “Christian Culture” is when they cannot get outside the system and be a Christian sharing the gospel. Contextualizing God puts Him in a box that cannot be shared outside of the system that you picked the box up from, the culture that you learned about God from. Naturally this is how we learn about life, from parents, school, friends, jobs, etc…The question is how do we respond to something when it does not fit into our system of context? Can we survive? The problem with the Christian Culture is that often it only flourishes in the culture that it represents, Christians. Outside of that it flounders and struggles to find any meaning because it has been contextualized. Which the message of hope, the Gospel, is something that goes way beyond culture or race, but spreads to the whole world. The problem is when people start to take the gospel to only fit inside their context.

The question that I got out of this answer was this:

The question is how do we respond to something when it does not fit into our system of context? Can we survive?

Thoughts, Opinions, Don’t care?

*Kyle

Check out this blog post from (someone I wish was a friend) Dan Kimball.
He reviews an upcoming article from Newsweek entitled “the decline and fall of Christian America”

Thought this would be relevant to recent discussion and what is going on in the world today.

Disclaimer: I did not write this article, nor does it express the views of this blog. I am just putting it up here for conversation and interest.

I was driving home from a long day at work when an idea hit me. Switching back and forth between my two favorite radio stations, the local ESPN station and NPR, I was trying to find something to take my mind off the long day, as I sat at the light engaged in the conversation I realized blogging is exactly like talk radio.

The point of talk radio is to have a discussion with the host and the audience. Whether it be the audience calling into the show or the host playing off  the audience emotions, the goal of the show is to stir a reaction and have interaction. This interaction is addicting, it grabs you and makes you sit in your driveway for an extra twenty minutes engaged in the conversation.

Blogging is all about creating emotions and tension. People come to your site, read what you have to say and then they do one of two things: they navigate away or they engage. A good blog post grabs you right away and stirs some kind of emotion inside of you and causes you to think, respond, and then share with other.  The main reason I blog is because I want to hear from people on thoughts that are running through my head. Sometimes I feel like I am a little crazy and so I want to see if other people are thinking the same thing as me. Often times blogging and talk radio can seem very impersonal, the divide between the radio and the interwebs can be overwhelming. What erases this divide is the chance to connect with a subject on a more personal basis in the realm of emotion and thought. In talk radio, you are giving your opinion about a hot topic. In blogging you are writing out your thoughts for others to see, hoping to connect and be validated in your opinions.
In both worlds you are throwing out your opinion to the masses and seeing if they reject it or accept what you have to say.

Blogging is the same as talk radio because you are driving people to an emotion, trying to create some kind of tension with the subject and then waiting to hear what people have to say.

Agree or Disagree?

*Kyle