arts and culture on Systems

Systems are perfectly designed to get the results they are getting.

Shalom is meant to be both personal (emphasizing our relationships with others) and structural (replacing systems where shalom has been broken or which produce broken shalom, such as war-or greed-driv...

Therefore, I’m proposing a new paradigm …that involves the following three core principles: 1. Reconciliation happens by repairing broken systems. 2. Reconciliation happens by engaging power. 3. Recon...

In the Critically acclaimed 2018 horror film A Quiet Place , Earth faces an alien invasion unlike any other. In the movie, the aliens behave like merciless monsters, using their lightning-fast sp...

We are complicit and we do not even realize it, O Holy God. Every day we participate in systems of idolatry, and we promote the captivity of a nation to gods. We have bought the subtle lies of our cul...

This summer, millions of people across the world will be absorbed in a highly anticipated, years-in-the-making, high-fantasy adventure featuring evil sorcerers, legendary swords, dragons, and a classi...

More than 50 percent of Americans live in suburbs, and many of them desire to live a Christian life. Yet often the suburbs are ignored (“Your place doesn’t matter, we’re all going to heaven anyway”), ...

This then is the individualistic view.…It means many good things: e.g. Genuine novelty; order being won, paid for; the smaller systems the truer; man [is greater than] home [is greater than] state or ...

Pride, and its more serious cousin, narcissism, really shouldn’t have any place in leadership circles in the church. When I became a serious follower of Jesus at a teenager, Philippians 2 became one o...

I know most Americans today do not worship Baal, but when I look at the church in America, I fear that we have our own Baals that demand our worship. I see so many people bowing down before prosperity...

The original sin of racism in America began with a deeply flawed and demonic notion that shaped this nations development. Bad science claimed that black bodies were biologically deficient, then extrap...

Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second-order one at best. Unlike many of life’s other delights—chocolate, surfing, kissing—it does not enjoy any mainline access to o...

I grew up near Washington D.C. surrounded by politics…I helped with the campaign of a friend’s father as he ran for state office, watched our friendly county supervisor become a US congressman, and le...

Not very long ago, “culture” commonly referred to what is now meant by “high culture.” For instance, we might have said, “She has such a cultured voice.” If a person read Shakespeare, Goethe, Gore Vid...

One of my favorite sections of Home Depot is the power garden tool department. Even though I have all the tools I need, I still like browsing through Home Depot’s collection of power mowers, chainsaws...

“Learning how to read, has been shown to “powerfully shape adult neuropsychological systems. Brain scans have also revealed that people whose written language uses logographic symbols, like the Chines...

I am programmed to expect that the world is what I can see, touch, and measure.

People are submitting themselves to time-devouring technology. We’re a nerve-racked society where people have difficulty sitting back and thinking of the purpose of what they do.

Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...

Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.

Culture consists of concepts, values, and assumptions about life that guide behavior and are widely shared by people. . . . [These] are transmitted generation to generation, rarely with explicit instr...

Science ... is organized common sense.

In the realm of physics, an all-encompassing theoretical framework that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe is called a theory of everything. It's also called a ...

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.

The normal course of day-to-day human interactions locks us into patterns of feeling, thought, and action that are geared to a world set against God. Nothing but solitude can allow the development of ...

Societies the world around are currently in desperate straits trying to produce people who are merely capable of coping with their life on earth in a nondestructive manner.

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfac...

In order to exercise leadership on that challenge, they had to go beyond what people expected of them, risk testing some relationships, and move themselves and their organizations into unfamiliar terr...

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.