culture on Marketing

You might have heard the story about the dog food company. They launched a new line of dog food, stocking it on shelves nationwide, but it didn’t sell well at all. Sales plummeted and the leadership d...

You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com...

For purposes of practicality and relatability, this series considers the Sea of Galilee to be a lake and classifies other fresh or mostly fresh water locations together under the same banner. Th...

The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the pri­vate, and the emotional hold sway. Yet. . . that is ...

A group of fourth-graders at a Christian school was given an assignment to draw what they would like to do if Jesus spent a day with them. After working diligently on their pictures, one little girl a...

Jesus is teaching us to stop loving things and using people and start using things and loving people.

We know in­stinctively that Christmas is more than shopping mall Santas, silver bells, and snow-flocked trees, but such things are so entangled with our impressions of Christmas that it’s hard to kn...

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes-central role in education, that is exactly what i...

Materialism is not fundamentally an economic problem, but a cultural one... a spiritual issue. It runs to the depths of our souls, and, for this reason, needs to be understood less in terms of budgets...

My suspicion is that we have simply lost our way. I suspect that our material longings are more largely formed by our culture than by the Christ and that our spending habits do not differ radically fr...

If you ever find yourself sympathizing with Charles Dickens’ character Ebenezer Scrooge regarding the commercialization of Christmas, you’re not alone—this has been a common complaint for quite some t...

Christmas in May I’m pretty sure it was Stephen Covey, back in the day ( The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People ) who originally said, “The main thing is to let the main thing be the main thing...

[Suffering] may be as serious for modern Christians as persecution and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries… it is the burden of living in a consumer culture where the individual looms lar...

Our culture invites us to experience everything! If we fail to take advantage of it all, we think we are missing out. But honestly, the web of invitations we are called to navigate is massive and c...

Culture is like gravity. We never talk about it, except in physics classes. We don’t include gravity in our weekly planning processes. No one gets up thinking about how gravity will affect their day. ...

The original language of Christianity is translation.

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...

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

On his hundredth birthday, a reporter asked the man the inevitable question: “What do you attribute your long life to?” The old man replied, “I haven’t decided yet. I’m still negotiating with a supple...

While there is a place for condemning, critiquing, consuming and copying culture, the primary posture Christ followers are to have in the world is as culture makers. In regard to history, the word cul...

We believe that the gospel is best lived out when churches are firmly rooted in their surrounding community's culture.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” For more,...

Christians are like manure: spread them out and they help everything grow better, but keep them in one big pile and they stink horribly.

In 1989, the advertising world welcomed a new icon into the world. It was pink, it was furry, it wore sunglasses, and sported a drum-set. Can you picture him? It’s the Energizer bunny. Television scre...

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.

We live in a culture that is obsessed with the right to have what we want.

Cultures like ours encourage us to consider all aspects of our lives in terms of self-interest. How do we cultivate a life marked by God’s love – a love that is always directed toward the needs of oth...

If one looks at the world scene from a missionary point of view, surely the most striking fact is that, while in great areas of Asia and Africa the church is growing, often growing rapidly, in the lan...

To reach people we must appreciate and adapt to their culture, but we must also challenge and confront it. This is based on the biblical teaching that all cultures have God's grace and natural rev...

When the movie The Da Vinci Code hit the theaters and the swirl of related controversy began to pick up speed, I decided finally to read the book so that I wouldn’t be found ignorant dinner parties. I...