arts and culture on Distortion

Think of an ancient icon of Christ. Imagine that a thousand-year-old Christ Pantocrator painted on a wooden panel is discovered in some forgotten monastery. The image of Christ is there, but it’s cove...

Distracted from distraction by distraction

When a musical instrument’s strings go loose, it sounds awful. But you can also overtighten the strings, breaking them or creating discord. There’s a perfect tension to grace and truth, which makes th...

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. . . . The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.

In His book When Narcissism Comes to Church, Chuck DeGroat describes a common tool employed on social media, gaslighting: Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that draws its name from a 1938 Bri...

From drugs and alcohol to TV and workaholism, we are increasingly a society that fulfills T.S. Eliot’s description of a people “distracted by distraction.” There is hardly a public menace we can name ...

We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

Perfection....it functions as a form of myopia, a preoccupation with self-image that can stunt emotional growth.

I believe we all need to reframe our stories, at least parts of them, in order to heal, to discard lies, to move from partial truths to richer, fuller explanations, to see our lives as God sees them.

“Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising,” announced Lord Peter sententiously, “is like leaven, w...

The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusion...

The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...

When my grandparents were in their eighties, their television developed a fault that made the screen permanently bright green. It was good for viewing garden shows or nature programs, but it was prett...

We are masters at creating an image, but we are novices at recognizing and repenting of the image we have created.

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

You decide to buy a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see it everywhere. A friend recommends an obscure movie to you, and by the end of the week, three more people have mentioned it. You find out ...

A taste of righteousness can be easily perverted into an overweening sense of self-righteousness and judgmentalism.

In this post-truth world, any marketing BS seems tolerable.

Cultural transformation in a church or organization must go beyond interpersonal models of changing “one person at a time,” which dominates Western evangelical thinking. The goals of reconciliation ne...

We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.

The journalist Andrew Sullivan has some strong words of advice for the modern church,  If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, p...

The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. . . . We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance—and choo...

Advertising - A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

Help us in this time of worship to be still and know that you are God. In quietness we would hear your voice calling us away from the discordant noises of the everyday world, that our spirits might be...

Leadership is often a matter of failing people’s expectations at a rate they can stand.

The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a...

When we insist on doing too much, we are not only inflicting the damage of this choice on ourselves, we are sharing this damage with those we love the most.

Like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our...

The human heart bends toward what the eye sees. Today’s image makers fling into the world's digital spectacles of sex, wealth, power, and popularity. Those images get inside us, shape us, and form...