arts and culture on Spectacle

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.

In the age of the spectacle, image is our identity, and our identity is unavoidably molded by our media.

The World watches the slandered church as something of a vain curiosity, but in reality, the church is a spectacle of her own—a large cast collectively playing the starring role as bride of in the hum...

I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...

Our culture is no longer banded together by shared beliefs; it’s drawn together by shared spectacles. Like Halloween costumes designed to match the most popular movies, we seek our self-identity insid...

Human spectacle making is like sorcery—an enchantment, a spell, the creation of an image that calls for a response from our inner longings. Idolatry is the original tele-vision, the bringing of a far-...

Like a smartphone screen made blank by the rays of direct sunshine, one day we shall see Christ’s face. On that day, all the vain spectacles in this world of illusions and all the pixelated idols of o...

Satan blinds hearts by filling eyes with worthless things. His veil over human hearts today is a veil of pixels, and the chains of his spiritual bondage are tethered to the world’s theater.

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...

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

In a world where sex, wealth, power, and beauty are the dominant idols, these idols will flood our dominant media.

The rise of both video spectacles and marketed consumables is no accidental marriage. Images capture our attention and lure us because they implicitly ask us to try on various costumes of identity, to...

Tennis superstar Andre Agassi was only nineteen years old when he starred in a television commercial for Canon cameras. The spot featured him in all sorts of eye-grabbing poses, a spectacle on display...

Again, human attention is a zero-sum game. At some point we must close all our screens and fall asleep—which makes sleep the enemy of digital spectacle makers (and sleep was named chief competitor by ...

Our culture is no longer banded together by shared beliefs; it’s drawn together by shared spectacles. Like Halloween costumes designed to match the most popular movies, we seek our self-identity insid...

The loss of furry mammals captures the public eye. The extinction of another few dozen beetle species—quite possibly not yet even known or cataloged—may not. Yet such losses may be equally troubling f...

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard t...

TV is imago populi—all of society’s trendy appetites incarnated into visible form and broadcasted.

We’re tourist Christians. We remain as long as we’re entertained.

In every walk of life each man puts on a personality and outward appearance so as to look what he wants to be thought; in fact you might say that society is entirely made up of assumed personalities.

Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while.

All great historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice ... the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Our natural tendency is to watch the world from behind the windows of [our] cultural home and to act as if people from other countries, ethnicities, or categories have something special about them, . ...

Beneath the clearly perceived, highly explicit surface culture, there lies a whole other world.

For all our time and attention, no matter how carefully we curate our stuff or how much we might enjoy ourselves along the way, we’re all merely stocking and staging someone else’s opportunity for bar...

“When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.”

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”

[There] are social idols that capture the life of the city…overarching sinful narratives on which people rely. We have to exegete them. We have to spot them out. We have to capture their core values, ...

A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which ...

We live in a culture where image is everything and substance nothing. We live in a culture where a new beginning is far more attractive than a long follow-through. Images are important. Beginnings are...