Characteristics of a True Superhero

The Lord, Hero of Heroes

By St. Nikolai Velimirovich

The Hero Lord, all heroes gathers He,

All who can maintain the Faith,

Faithful to God, to death remain;

And who can, endure sufferings

Offering thanksgiving to God

And of their sufferings being proud;

And, who others can forgive,

And insults to receive as praise;

And still, who others can instruct

Why Zombies Matter

By Russell D. Moore

Zombies are everywhere. Ever since the classic “Night of the Living Dead,” the undead have shown up in movies. Zombies now are featured in top-rated cable TV shows, and in apocalyptic novels and survival guides. An entire genre has ignited around the concept of adding zombies to classic literature (“Pride and Prejudice with Zombies,” etc.). But why are we drawn to these gruesome figures?

In the New York Times, columnist Amy Wilentz reminds us why zombies scare us, and why we can’t help but watch through our clenched hands covering our eyes. The zombie myth is rooted in something quite real, and quite terrifying. The zombie stories emerged in a Caribbean context of brutal slavery. The zombie’s horror is that he is, she writes, a slave forever. After all, if even death cannot free you, you can never be free.

That’s exactly the point, and here’s why it should matter to Christians.

Zombies are horrifying not simply because they’re mean and aggressive. They are horrifying because they represent what ought to repulse us: the rotting decay of death. But they still walk. And, beyond that, they still crave. In their search for human brains, they are driven along by their appetites, though always under the sway of a slavemaster’s will.

That’s our story.

The biblical story of the Fall of humanity is one of a humanity that comes under the sway of death by obeying the appetite. God places a fiery sword around the Garden of Eden, Genesis tells us, so that the primeval humans wouldn’t eat of the Tree of Life and live forever. Why? It’s because God didn’t want to consign humanity to a never-ending existence of this kind of walking death. He sentences us to the curse of death so that, ultimately, we can be redeemed.

The gospel tells us that, apart from Christ, we were walking in the flesh, that is slavishly obeying our biological impulses and appetites without the direction of the Spirit. As such, we were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). But we weren’t inert. We instead, though dead, “walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). We were walking dead slaves.

And, in our death, our appetites weren’t silenced but instead drove us along. This walking death, the Apostle Paul writes, was driven along as we “carried out the desires of the body and the mind” (Eph. 2:3).

Caribbean people could resonate with the horror of zombies because they knew what it was like to be enslaved by evil people, with no hope of escape. And maybe our culture pays attention to zombies because we know what it is like to be dead inside, but unable to find peace, unable to stop walking.

The gospel doesn’t just extend our lives forever into eternity. That’s what we, left to ourselves, think we want. The rich young ruler asks Jesus how he can inherit eternal life, but Jesus points out that he wants to eternalize his present state rather than to be hidden in the life of Jesus himself. That’s a zombie walk, and Jesus loves us too much for that.

Jesus offers instead life, and that abundantly, as we eat of his flesh, drink of his blood, share in his triumph over the accusing slavemaster.

So let’s have some sympathy for the zombies. And next time you see the trailer for a zombie film, or see the picture of a walking corpse on the cover of a novel, remember that that was your story once too.

Source

Pop Culture's New Enchantment With Witchcraft

Meryl Streep in a scene from the forthcoming film Into the Woods. Photograph: CAP/NFS/Image supplied by Capital Pictures.

Sarah Hughes

October 26, 2013

The Guardian

When Ryan Murphy, the creator of American Horror Story, announced that the third season of the American TV series would focus on witches, he was riding the crest of a wave. Not since the 1990s – the era of Buffy's geek goddess, Willow Rosenberg, and a scowling Fairuza Balk in The Craft – have witches been so much in demand.

In the young-adult section of bookshops, shelves that recently groaned under the weight of tales of tormented vampires and lovelorn werewolves, are now stuffed with stories of witchcraft and magic, from Ruth Warburton's much-praised Winter Trilogy to Jessica Spotswood's Cahill Witch Chronicles. Lower down the age range, last month the most recent in Jill Murphy's long-running Worst Witch series was published, while among the predictions for this Christmas's bestselling toys are the Bratz spinoff, House of Witchez. For adults, next year will mark the climax of Deborah Harkness's All Souls Trilogy, centring on the relationship between a vampire and a feisty American witch.

In film, highlights of the BFI's gothic season include Burn Baby Burn! a festival of witchcraft on film, which comes to Belfast's Queens Film Theatre in early November, and the once-banned 1922 Danish witch movie Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages, showing this week at Filmhouse Edinburgh and the following week at the Glasgow Film Theatre and Dundee Contemporary Arts. Even Meryl Streep is getting in on the act – recent stills from the forthcoming film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods show her transformed into a hag complete with wild grey hair and long nails.

However, it is on television that the season of the witch has truly taken hold. In addition to American Horror Story, with its tale of voodoo queens and teenage witches, there's Lifetime's The Witches of East End, adapted from a novel by Melissa de la Cruz and featuring a family of spellcasters led by Julia Ormond. Vampire Diaries spinoff The Originals (on the Syfy channel) has a central storyline about witchcraft and in Universal's Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane deals with dueling covens in present-day America.

So why witches – and why now? "The idea of being able to manipulate supernatural forces still resonates," says Owen Davies, professor of social history at the University of Hertfordshire and author of America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem. "Witches and ghosts speak to something fundamental and innate in our psyche. It's an emotional connection."

The last time witches were so in fashion, in the 1990s, the response from young girls was intense. "When Buffy and Charmed were at their peak, I would get letters from teenage girls, mainly from America, asking for help about where to look for spells," says Davies. "Those shows gave teenage girls a feeling of empowerment; there's something very appealing about magic and witchcraft. There have also been studies of girls who were interested in witch shows in the 1990s, following how many went on to become practising wiccans. It's not a huge number, but it's interesting that some of them watched the shows and thought, 'I want to know more'."

Ruth Warburton, whose latest young-adult novel, Witch Finder, will be out in January, feels the growing interest is partially driven by a teenage desire to see girls in less passive roles. The most striking thing about the recent movie Beautiful Creatures (adapted from a bestselling teen novel) was that the hero worshipped from the sidelines as his witch girlfriend came into her powers.

"Often the traditional way of looking at relationships in young-adult fiction is that the guy has all the power and the interesting life and the girl goes along for the ride, but that's not the whole story," says Warburton. "Increasingly, we're trying to bring our daughters up to believe they can be the leader; they can have the adventure; they can do the cool stuff and one thing about witches is that they allow you to explore that moment when girls become teenagers and realise the power they have as women and how exhilarating that can be."

It is also arguable that these new shows reflect a changing attitude in television. The era of the anti-hero is coming to a close with the end of Breaking Bad and the final seasons of Mad Men. In their place have come female-centric shows, from Orange is the New Black to Masters of Sex, and Scandal. Thus Witches of East End is as interested in the bonds between mothers and daughters as in potions and curses, while American Horror Story: Coven conducts a serious examination of outsiderdom, exclusion and the nature of power. "The witches are a great allegory for any minority group that's been persecuted and had to go underground and finally is like: 'You know what? Dammit no, we're fighting back,'" the show's creator Murphy said.

It helps that both shows are happy to play with stereotypes. We tend to see witches as withered crone or seductive enchantress, Baba Yaga or Morgan Le Fay, yet for Witches of East End the key is that these women are a normal family with a family's ups and downs.

Yet Davies argues that the key to witch-related success remains image. "The image of the witch has transformed from someone extremely dangerous, through the sexy domesticated witches of Bewitched to the new wave of young, sexy witches in Charmed and Buffy to now," he says. "We're not interested in the mundane reality – we don't want to watch a drama about someone falsely accused of bewitching a pig." In other words, just as our vampires are now soulful lost boys, so our witches must be appealing in looks, if not always in deed.

See also:

Witches in Film and Pictures

Why Do Witches Wear Pointy Hats?

Orthodox Saints and the Future of America

By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos

The latest information from our press has announced a new book written about the late actress Marilyn Monroe by Joyce Carl Oates, which in reality is presented as a fictional biography. But what is important in this case and needs to be noted is that in the interview granted by the author of this book there is a characteristic quote: "In America cinematography is a religion. We don't have saints, but we have folklore" (Ελευθεροτυπία, 11/06/2000).

America is a young country, the so-called "new world", created after the migration of entire populations of Europe, primarily to find work. In this way the spirit of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment with all its consequences on individual and social life was transferred. So the spirit that prevails is rationalism and sensationalism. This affects all social behaviors, which is why Puritanism dominates the American land.

When one reads several books by American writers they will find that the examples they use come from films, which at their basis represent the American environment and the American atmosphere, where there is no deep theological or philosophical thought. This shows that indeed cinema is a religion in America, and actors are considered models and idols.

Frank Schaeffer, in his book Dancing Alone: The Quest for Orthodox Faith in the Age of False Religion, writes: "Unlike the ancient Orthodox Churches in various countries such as Palestine, Africa, Greece, Ukraine and Russia, the Orthodox Church in North America (with the exception of the Church in Alaska) is entirely a Church of migrants. The founders were not monks and missionaries, but people seeking to find a better life."

In the Roman Empire, known as Byzantium, the standards of our society were the Saints, the deified, whoever had communion with God at various levels. Even today in Greece we honor, celebrate and process our Saints. This is precisely the difference between our country and other countries, especially America. If we don't understand this truth we will not be able to understand the difference between us. For this reason Greece and the Greeks of America play an important role in changing the climate and culture in America. When the manners and customs of our country are transferred there, which at its basis is an ecclesiastical atmosphere and life, then the climate of America will change, which has been influenced by Protestantism, who rejected the Saints.

Our models should be the Saints and not the "American dream", in which there are no saints, but folktales from the fields of art, science and politics.

Source: Paremvasis, "Εποχή χωρίς Αγίους", March 2001. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.

"The Passion of the Christ": An Orthodox Perspective (film review)

By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos

On occasion films are created that display the Cross and Passion of Christ as their content, in order to move Christians in regards to these great events. We see this also in our days with the new movie about the Passion of Christ titled The Passion of the Christ, directed by Mel Gibson.

The Orthodox Church does not give much importance to such screenings for serious theological reasons. We will identify primarily three reasons.

The first reason is that the Passion and the Cross of Christ are integrally tied together with the Resurrection of Christ. When the Passion and the Cross are disconnected from the Resurrection of Christ, then they do not express the crucified-resurrection experience of the Church.

The second reason is that the Cross and Resurrection of Christ are historical events that took place at some point in historical time, but it is ultimately a mysterious and lived experience within the heart of man, which is transformed with repentance, Orthodox asceticism, and the sacramental and liturgical life. Therefore, it is not an aesthetic issue, but ascetical, mystical and devotional.

The third reason is that the Church, by reminding us each year of the Passion, the Cross and the Resurrection of Christ, doesn't urge us towards an emotional feeling, a vision or to hear these events, but towards a personal co-crucifixion and co-resurrection with Christ. That is, it is not intended to emotionally charge us or to bring remembrance, but to transform our passions and to psychosomatically transform us.

It is precisely for these reasons that the Church invites us to experience the mystery of the Cross and the Resurrection of Christ in worship, but most certainly within the context of Orthodox asceticism. With worship, asceticism and the sacraments, especially the Mystery of the Divine Eucharist, everyone can experience mystically and spiritually, as well as psychosomatically, the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ.

Of course we live in an era of emotions and sensations, which is why people prefer to see Christ through films and not experience Christ with the conditions recommended by the Orthodox Church. They would rather experience Christ in the flesh and not in the spirit. But such aesthetic approaches to the Cross and Resurrection of Christ, besides diverting us from the mystery of the crucifixion-resurrection, it simultaneously leads us to heretical deviations, because the presentation of the human element of Christ in films leads straight to Nestorianism.

We must realize the great importance of Orthodox asceticism, ecclesiastical worship, and the sacramental life. Every human approach to Christ increases existential frustration.

Source: Paremvasi, "Τα πάθη του Χριστού", March 2004. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.

See also: 10 Facts about the Passion of the Christ You Never Knew

Was the Resurrected Jesus a Zombie?

It has become quite common, and a bit overstated, these days to refer to the post-resurrected Jesus as "Zombie Jesus", thinking that there is a comparison between the features of the risen Jesus with that of Zombies as depicted in popular culture, both said to rise from the dead. Usually such comparisons are not based on any compelling intellectual arguments, but it is worth examining nonetheless. Does the resurrected Jesus display Zombie-like characteristics to warrant such a comparison? The folks at ZombieTheology.com examined both features and characteristics in a neutral fashion to give us the answer. After an analysis of the resurrected Jesus as described in the Gospels and the traditional pop culture Zombie depicted by George Romero (of Night of the Living Dead fame), here is what they found:

ROMERO ZOMBIES

- Zombies are human bodies that died and have come back to life.

- Zombies only possess basic motor skills.

- Zombies cannot talk. At best they can communicate like animals through moans and groans.

- Zombies have one intention: to eat the living.

- Zombies are dangerous.

- Zombies are physical, they have no supernatural abilities.

- Zombies bodies are decaying and rotting.

- Zombies are not capable of complex thoughts or problem solving skills.

GOSPEL JESUS

- Yes, Jesus did die and come back to life.

- Jesus built a fire and cooked fish for Peter and a few of his other followers. Building a fire requires use of very fine motor skills. – John 21

- Jesus talks to several people after rising from the dead. – John 21 (for one example)

- Jesus seemed to have no intention of eating people, and we have no record of him eating any humans after rising from the dead; we do however see him eating fish and honeycomb (so not even just meat). – Luke 24:42-43

- Jesus did not seem dangerous at all, on the contrary people were happy to be around him. He traveled with two of his followers (without them even knowing it was him) and they asked him to stay with them when he was getting ready to part from them. If he were dangerous it would not make sense to ask him to stay. – Luke 24:29

- Something really interesting about the resurrected Jesus was his ability to walk through walls and disappear. These seem like some kind of supernatural function which Zombies are incapable of. – Luke 24:31, John 20:19

- Jesus’s body did still have the holes from the spear and nails, but surprisingly Thomas, one of his followers, was not afraid to stick his finger in those holes. Jesus broke bread and cooked fish and people ate these things. If Jesus were a rotting corpse it seems unlikely that people would be so willing to eat the food he prepared or stick their hands in his side. John 20: 27, Luke 24:42-43, John 21

- The resurrected Jesus could talk, he prepared meals, he explained complicated doctrines, asked tough questions, performed supernatural acts, and did several other things that demonstrated problem solving and complex thought processes. His actions and words demonstrated something beyond human, not subhuman such as the living dead.

So whether you are a Christian or not, it is clear from Scripture that the risen Jesus it describes is certainly not a Zombie. One is forced to disbelieve the Bible and write off the resurrection all together, or embrace the Bible’s story and realize that the risen Jesus was someone who was raised in glory, not decay. Whichever you choose, a Zombie Jesus is clearly not an option.

Dolce & Gabbana Inspired By Byzantine Splendor

March 1, 2013

Greek News Agenda

The new Dolce & Gabbana Autumn 2013 collection pays homage to the grandeur of Byzantine splendor. Byzantine iconography printed on dresses would be a blasphemy according to 9th century Byzantine Iconoclasm, whereas people who venerated religious images were called iconodules or Iconophiles - and D&G definitely reveres icons!

Inspired by the Byzantine mosaic of Santa Maria Nuova in Monreale, Sicily, their collection boasts lavishly bejewelled and mosaicized dresses, gold chandelier earrings and gold tiaras, with the characteristic colors of the period - burgundy red, glorious gold and imperial black.

Simulating the slow art of mosaic making, the garments are transformed into real works of art, and tailoring is executed single stitch by single stitch in order to convey the beauty and majesty of the Byzantine mosaics.

Photo Gallery

The Monsters Among Us

October 30, 2012

Science Daily

With Halloween approaching, people turn their attention to the spooky and the scary, reveling in stories and images of ghosts, ghouls and witches for the holiday. However, while some monstrous characters only come out to play in October; others enjoy attention year round.

For example, in recent years, vampire media has gained popularity, from Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" series of books and films to HBO's "True Blood," which finished its fifth season this summer. Zombies have recently seen a resurgence in popularity as well, evidenced by new takes on the genre, such as Zach Synder's 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead," Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" and Edgar Wright's "Shaun of the Dead." Zombies have even shambled onto the television screen with AMC's "The Walking Dead."

Hollywood is quick to cash in on what's popular, but why do themes gain popularity in the first place? Does the prevalence of a certain monster reflect what's going on in our society today?

Zombies and God

5 Religious Questions That Zombie Stories Ask Us

Stant Litore

October 25, 2012

The Huffington Post

"And he asked me, Son of man, can these bones live?" -- Ezekiel

Since releasing the first novels in "The Zombie Bible," I've heard from a lot of readers asking me what zombies have to do with the Bible -- or what the Bible has to do with zombies. The answer is a lot, and I'm not just talking about the Bible's numerous references to either the risen dead or the restless dead.

After all, Western religion asks a series of nearly unanswerable questions: How do we, as a community, manage the excesses of human passion and drive? How do we maintain a just community while living in a world that wants to eat us? Is there a God in that world, and if there is, does he love us?

And though they lurch out of left field and are rarely written by philosophers or theologians, zombie stories tend to stalk down these same questions and chew their way right into them.

Let's take a look.

1. No More Room in Hell

"When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." That was the tagline for Romero's zombie flicks of the '60s and '70s. It speaks to a bleak vision of humanity -- that our species is capable of packing hell until it overflows with men and women who are so given to their hungers that eventually they exist only to feed those hungers, rather than their hungers existing to feed them. Zombie stories throw into sharp contrast the best and worst of what we are. In "28 Days Later," it is our capacity for rage and mindless violence that is highlighted; in "Dawn of the Dead" and "Shaun of the Dead," it's our rampant consumerism; in the original script for "I Am Legend," it's our ability to hate.

Zombie stories boil all our postmodern angst down to one of the essential religious questions: How bad are we? And does love trump that? In religious terms, are we creatures of sin or creatures of love?

2. People Devour People

Fyodor Dostoevsky said that hell is the inability to love. Zombie stories go a step further, defining hell-on-earth as what happens when not only are we unable to love but the only way we know to seek union with another is to devour them. The Bible warns about wolves in sheep's clothing, and Jesus instructs Peter three times to show his love by "feeding the sheep." But what if we live in a world where the sheep eat the sheep? What then?

3. Eyes That Don't Look Back

Besides gore, a trademark of the zombie story is those gray, vacant eyes. The dead look at you and they don't really see you. They see food. That's all they see. I don't know if there are many things more horrifying than to be seen by another human being as nothing more than an object to consume. The philosopher Levinas describes the way that the human gaze demands a response. To look into the eyes of the other is to see their demand that you recognize them as not other, as someone who is like you, someone who hungers and suffers and loves even as you do. The dead don't do that. Can the living?

The first article of Judeo-Christian theology, one of the earliest statements made in the Old Testament or the Torah, is that humanity, male or female, is created in the image of God. Zombie stories force us into a place where we have to interrogate that, or at least question how faithful we have been to that ethical statement. Do we see something divine and valued when we look at another man or woman, or do we see food for our fears, our ambitions or our needs?

4. Life is Choice

AMC's "The Walking Dead" repeatedly presents its ragged crew of post-apocalypse survivors with ethical dilemmas, demanding that they choose between what may be necessary and what may be right. As though to force the question: How do we live together in a rapidly decomposing world? Zombie stories wrestle with free will. Do the survivors have the ability to determine their future, or are they doomed from the beginning by the hunger of their race and the moral and physical evils of a dead world that live on unburied?

Novels like "I, Zombie" by Hugh Howey cast the life of the zombie in the same light. Howey's zombies are still conscious and retain the memories of their past lives, but are powerless to halt their violent actions -- because their hungers are a continuation of the hungers and addictions under which they lived.

Do we have choices?

5. Lives of Unstoppable Hope

If, either on religious or philosophical grounds, a zombie story suggests that we do have choices, then the zombie story becomes an allegory of hope.

Father Polycarp in "What Our Eyes Have Witnessed" emphasizes the need to live lives of unstoppable hope, even in the face of almost certain failure. He says this in a Roman ghetto in the second century A.D., as the dead devour starving survivors who have been abandoned by their uphill neighbors. Possibly zombie stories are so attractive to us because they ask this final religious question: What reason do we have for the hope within us? Why, in the face of the global food crisis, a genocide every decade, climate change, world poverty and finally, the ravenous dead -- why, in the face of all that, do we not just lie down and die?

Conclusion

Zombie stories invite us to write for ourselves a secular theology of the dead. And to our battered world here in the early 21st century, that elusive theology remains a uniquely appealing one.

Christians and Horror: Three Views

In 2011 the website Zombie Theology (no longer in existence) did a series on the three different views Christians generally have in regard to the horror genre. They were written by three different Christian authors who stated their case for each, providing an interesting and helpful exchange of opinions regarding this divisive topic. Below are the links to the original sources:

Christians and Horror

Introduction

View 1: Christians are free to participate in horror genres

View 2: Christians can participate in horror genres with limitations

View 3: Christians should NOT participate in horror genres

Conclusion

The Critique of Pure Horror

Jason Zinoman

July 16, 2011

The New York Times

WITH gruesome television series about vampires, werewolves, serial killers and zombies earning huge ratings, and a new cinematic bloodbath opening seemingly every week, the cultural appetite for horror raises a curious question: why do so many of us enjoy being disgusted and terrified?

The question has long puzzled parents and mystified spouses, but it has also increasingly engaged the attention of academics. Scholarship on the horror genre has grown so much over the last three decades that a peer-reviewed journal devoted to it, Horror Studies, was started last year. While much of the field’s research is sociological or cultural, focusing on what scary movies reveal about the time or place in which they were made, a small library of books and essays has also tried to explain the visceral appeal of shivers down your spine.

For horror studies the “It’s alive!” moment was the 1979 publication of “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” an essay by the film critic Robin Wood. At a time when horror was treated by many as a second-class genre, Mr. Wood introduced the now-familiar idea, rooted in psychoanalytic theory, that scary movies provide a valuable window onto what our society “represses or oppresses.” The monster, he wrote, represents the marginalized, the sexually or politically subversive, the taboo: the 1931 film “Frankenstein” identified the creature with repressed homosexuality; the first zombie in the 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead” was a manifestation of family dysfunction.

Mr. Wood did not try to explain why such transgressive elements can be pleasurable, but other scholars borrowed his framework to do just that. In the 1986 article “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine,” Barbara Creed, a film professor at the University of Melbourne, located the appeal of horror’s blood and gore in a nostalgia for the uninhibited time in childhood before filth became taboo.

The 1987 essay “Her Body, Himself,” by Carol J. Clover of the University of California, Berkeley, argued that horror movies offer their teenage male viewers an illicit opportunity to revel in their feminine side. Contesting the claim that horror encourages a sadistic male gaze, Ms. Clover took a closer look at the low-budget exploitation film, in which typically all the female characters are murdered, save for the sole woman who struggles to survive and ultimately escape the villain. Classic examples include Jamie Lee Curtis’s role as Laurie Strode in “Halloween” and Marilyn Burns’s as Sally Hardesty in “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”

Ms. Clover argued that this was one of the few film genres that regularly asked male audiences to identify with a triumphant female protagonist. It gave teenage boys license to indulge a gender-bending fantasy that was, she wrote, “unapproved for adult males.”

While these scholars argued that horror taps into positive emotions that are otherwise repressed, other psychoanalytic theories saw horror in the opposite light: as a safe and cathartic way to deal with darker feelings. In his 1980 essay “The Aesthetics of Fright,” the critic Morris Dickstein described horror as a “routinized way of playing with death, like going on the roller coaster.”

But not all theories of horror have been psychoanalytic, trading on notions of repression and release. In 1990 the philosopher Noël Carroll, a staunch critic of the psychoanalytic approach, published “The Philosophy of Horror,” in which he proposed that the pleasure of horror movies is due not to whatever psychic substratum the monster represents, but rather to the peculiar curiosity it inspires.

The defining characteristic of the monster, Mr. Carroll argued, is that it’s hard to classify, categorically incomplete or contradictory, or just generally hard to understand. The monster in the “Frankenstein” series, for instance, is what Mr. Carroll called a “fusion figure,” made of spare parts, including different brains. The horror is rooted in the unknown, but this strangeness also sparks curiosity and fascination. Horror plots are often constructed to emphasize the mystery of the nature of the monster. Most of “The Exorcist,” for example, is taken up with the intricate detective work of a mother trying to figure out what is wrong with her daughter.

One virtue of Mr. Carroll’s theory is that it captures the paradoxical nature of horror’s allure: the very oddity that makes monsters repulsive is precisely what makes them attractive.

In today’s age of increasingly explicit cinematic violence, the scholarly focus has gravitated to the basic pleasures of gore. In “The Naked and the Undead,” Cynthia Freeland, a feminist critic who teaches philosophy at the University of Houston, argues that certain kinds of graphic violence are so skillfully theatrical that they evoke a “perverse sublime.” Their far-fetched extremity also gives the audience the distance needed to relish the bloodbaths. Ms. Freeland cites the ghoulishly over-the-top scenes in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2,” including a sparks-flying chain saw duel between the masked killer Leatherface and a vamping Dennis Hopper that, just to make things more interesting, adds a hatchet and grenade into the mix.

In an essay that will be published later this year in “The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film,” Adam Lowenstein, an associate professor in English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh, also emphasizes the aesthetic of horror. For him, meticulous camerawork, pacing and artful splatter are a kind of carefully staged showmanship that the audience appreciates as pure performance. He calls it “spectacle horror.” When Laurie Strode discovers a trio of dead bodies in “Halloween” — one emerging swinging from a closet, another from a cabinet — it’s a highly staged sequence in which the director, John Carpenter, is “quite literally pulling the strings on this series of attractions,” Mr. Lowenstein writes.

What are we to make of all these theories? Now that horror is a standard feature of the mainstream cultural menu, the genre has increasingly become like any other where craft and beauty are drawing cards. But what will always distinguish horror is its unique capacity to make us tremble. And it’s unlikely that any single theory will ever entirely explain that appeal, for fear is as personal and subjective as beauty.

To be sure, the psychoanalytic approach, drawing as it does on feelings and impulses born early in childhood, captures something important; adults forget just how terrifying being a small child can be. But children also adapt quickly, and not all frights are unpleasant: peekaboo, after all, is one of the first games any child plays, and “Hansel and Gretel” introduces readers to cannibalism before inviting them to celebrate the burning of a witch.

If getting scared is one of our first pleasures, then maybe horror movies are just a reminder of how much fun we used to have.

Jason Zinoman, a frequent contributor to "The New York Times", is the author of “Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror.”

Vampires and Religion in Popular Culture

Vastly different worlds share similar symbolism.

JoAnne Viviano

October 28, 2012

The Columbus Dispatch

Walk into Jess Peacock’s home, and you’ll think he’s ready to throw one heck of a Halloween party.

Dolls in coffins bookend other creatures on the mantel, a crematorium sign is on one wall, prop skulls and gargoyles lurk about, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter watches from a movie poster.

But the horror paraphernalia is no holiday collection; it represents both Peacock’s passion and his academic pursuits. The theology student examines the intersection of religion and vampires in popular culture. His scholarly materials include books on the undead, such as three copies of his “favorite novel of all time” — Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.

“The vampire subgenre provides the unique opportunity, in some ways, to give symbolic flesh to theological concepts,” said Peacock, a graduate student at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio in Delaware who has presented his research in various venues and is writing a book. “A lot of people don’t know they’re talking about it or listening to it when they’re watching a movie or reading a book.”

Consider crosses, sacred ground, drinking blood and immortality.

The religious connotations stretch from pre-modern writings to the 21st century, where a new audience is entranced by the young-adult Twilight books and films and the True Blood HBO television series and books.

Vampires represent “sin, temptation, Satan and even God,” Peacock writes in his research, and the narrative “deals with issues of the soul, the hope for a life hereafter and the potential of forces beyond our control to deface that hope.”

That’s not to say that watching horror movies will make you embrace religion. Peacock says he doesn’t consider himself religious, and he has been watching vampires and other demons on the big screen since he was a child.

“It would be impossible to construct a coherent and sensible theological framework from which to develop any type of legitimate belief structure,” he writes. But the vampire, he adds, can be a “relevant and imaginative symbol” to spur conversation about heavy theological concepts generally reserved for churches and college campuses. Such topics might include the existence of evil in a world guided by a loving God; the fear and horror that come with awe of the divine; and liberation theology, which focuses on fighting oppression.

The vampire in American culture traces its root to pre-modern Slavic peasants and has morphed over the years to embody the changing fears and anxieties of society, said Dan Collins, an associate professor of Slavic languages at Ohio State University who teaches a course titled “Vampires, Monstrosity, and Evil: From Slavic Myth to Twilight.”

To those peasants, vampires represented the cosmic battle between good and evil, God and Satan, and were used to explain infant death, disease, loss of crops and cattle and other adversity, Collins said. In 1897, author Bram Stoker used Dracula to reflect the religious skepticism of his society and explore why harm comes to good people who develop into instruments of God to subdue the evil and restore justice.

Collins said the 20th century brought tormented, remorseful vampires whose evil natures were watered down and attributed to external hardships and psychological illnesses as society grappled to understand what made people do “evil” things. Think Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, which portrays Lestat and Louis as not evil but tormented. Now on the scene are the Twilight vampires, including the undead Edward, a golden boy who resists premarital sex and avoids drinking human blood. This theme reflects the fears and anxieties of the teenage girls to whom the series is marketed, Collins said.

“The vampire has become the shadow side, the dangerous side of the human psyche,” he said.

Peacock said the recent changes could reflect a shift from the vampire as an overtly religious figure to a more-secular one, perhaps as a similar change takes place across society.

Consider the film Dracula 2000, in which the Prince of Darkness is revealed to be none other than Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus Christ. (His death comes at the hands of a 21st century woman named Mary who works at a Virgin Megastore.)

Flash-forward about seven years: In the film 30 Days of Night, a woman cowers before a vampire, saying “Please, God. Please.” The villain asks, “God?” and after looking at the sky, shakes his head and declares, “No God.”

“The shift in theological tone is fascinating in and of itself,” Peacock said. “If there is a connection between a wane in religion and a wane in the vampire genre, that’s vastly fascinating."

Cosmic Horror vs. Holy Terror: Christians Can Find Value and Meaning in Scary Movies

Jason Morehead

October 15, 2012

Christ and Pop Culture

The nights are getting longer, darker, and colder these days, making it the perfect time to pull out your favorite horror novel or scary movie and get the heebie-jeebies before bedtime. Probably not, though, if you’re a Christian. I would suspect that the “horror” genre is one of the most unpopular genres — literary, cinematic, or otherwise — for Christians, and understandably so. Many entries in the genre seem to do little else but revel in cruelty, sadism, and gore, e.g., the recent wave of “torture porn” films.

However, Christianity Today‘s Jonathan Ryan argues that it is possible for Christians to find value in the horror genre. He writes:

I find meaning—including biblical truths and theological implications—throughout much of the genre. My appreciation for meaning in scary stories finds its roots deep in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and his concept of “cosmic horror,” as well as in the works of Arthur Machen with his notion of “holy terror.” One is rife with despair, the other clings to hope. The contrast between the two results in a remarkable tension found in the history of horror.

Ryan surveys modern horror and finds most of it nihilistic, which he traces directly back to the influence of Lovecraft, who is best known for stories like The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft’s worldview can be summed up thusly:

The human race will disappear. Other races of beings will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure ‘Victorian fictions.’ Only egotism exists.

This nihilism can be seen even in such recent movies as The Cabin in the Woods and Prometheus, though both films try to mask the horror at their core through different approaches. Ryan compares and contrasts this with Arthur Machen, an Anglican Christian who wrote horror stories containing many of the same ideas and storylines as Lovecraft’s works, but with a different perspective.

Machen felt despair could be avoided by seeing the good God who ruled over the world “behind the veil.” A person could experience holy terror like the prophet Isaiah felt when he stood before the throne of God—or, to bring it back to movies, like Indiana Jones showed in Raiders of the Lost Ark (telling Marion to respect the ark’s power by not looking at it when it was opened) and The Last Crusade (when, to reach the Holy Grail, he had to navigate a treacherous maze requiring him to kneel, to spell God’s holy name, and then take a literal “leap of faith”). Machen uses sacred terror to not only scare us, but to push us deeper to think about “unseen realities.” Through this sacred terror, he created stories richer and more terrifying than anything Lovecraft could conceive. As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.”

If nothing else, the horror genre is one of the few genres that openly admits the presence of true evil. The challenge, however, that horror novels and movies often fail to overcome is portraying such evil without somehow celebrating or glamorizing it, or presenting it in an exploitative or titillating fashion. If you’re looking for some good cinematic scares for this spooky season that rise above mere exploitation, then I suggest looking at Arts & Faith’s “Top 25 Horror Films.” Some of the entries on the list may surprise you, but their portraits of evil have all been deemed worth considering and reflecting upon by the critics, writers, filmmakers, and fans in the Arts & Faith community.

But if you want to head into the theatre for a good scare this month, consider Sinister. Not only has the movie garnered pretty good reviews — it currently holds a “Fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes — but it was written and directed by Scott Derrickson, a Christian who has argued in the past that the horror genre is the perfect genre for Christians to be involved in, again because of its acknowledgment of evil’s existence in the world around us, and more important, in our own hearts.

The Postmodern Sacred

Emily McAvan’s interesting thesis, summarized in an issue of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, has now been expanded in her recently published thesis The Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres. Below is an abstract of McAvan's earlier thesis along with a link, together with a description of her book:

By Emily McAvan

Division of Arts

Murdoch University

Journal of Religion and Popular Culture

Vol. 22(1)-Spring 2010

Abstract

I argue that the return of the religious in contemporary culture has been in two forms: the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist—and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both produces postmodern media culture and is itself always already mediated through the realm of the fictional. Secular and profane are always entangled within one another, a constant and pervasive media presence that modulates the way that contemporary subjects experience themselves and their relationship to the spiritual. I use popular culture as an entry point, an entry point that can presume neither belief nor unbelief in its audiences, showing that it is “unreal” texts such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Passion of the Christ and Left Behind that we find religious symbols and ideas refracted through a postmodernist sensibility, with little regard for the demands of “real world” epistemology. I argue that it is in this interplay between traditional religions and New Age-ised spirituality in popular culture that the sacred truly finds itself in postmodernity.

Read the entire study here.

And below is the description of her recent book The Postmodern Sacred:

From The Matrix and Harry Potter to Stargate SG:1 and The X-Files, recent science fiction and fantasy offerings both reflect and produce a sense of the religious. This thoughtful volume examines this pop-culture spirituality, or “postmodern sacred,” showing how consumers use the symbols contained in explicitly “unreal” texts to gain a second-hand experience of transcendence and belief. Topics include how media technologies like CGI have blurred the lines between real and unreal, the polytheisms of Buffy and Xena, the New Age Gnosticism of The DaVinci Code, the Islamic “Other” and science fiction’s response to 9/11, and the Christian Right and popular culture. Today’s pervasive, saturated media culture, this work shows, has utterly collapsed the sacred/profane binary, so that popular culture is not only powerfully shaped by the discourses of religion, but also shapes how the religious appears and is experienced in the contemporary world.

The Ethics of Facebook, Twitter and Social Media

By Douglas Groothuis

SYNOPSIS

Social media are growing explosively and are changing the way people around the globe think of friendship and community. While media such as Facebook offer us unique opportunities, they also present real dangers. Christians should realize that not all forms of culture are advantageous to human flourishing and that every medium has it limitations. We are shaped in profound ways by every medium of communication. Yet, for all its immediacy and possibilities, the computer world of social media cannot replace the significance of embodied interactions. Friendship, fellowship, and community cannot be duplicated at the deepest levels in social media. Nevertheless, if we resist gossip and gullibility, and are careful not to overexpose ourselves in these media, we can engage these forms of communication wisely and usefully. The following principles can help guide our involvement with social media: (1) Monitor yourself for unhealthy behavior. (2) Restrict late evening and early morning for other activities. (3) Avoid narcissism and present one’s true self. (4) Pay special attention to specific Facebook friends each month. (5) Be skeptical of how others present themselves on Facebook. (6) Periodically abstain from Facebook. (7) Develop a philosophy of what a Facebook friend should mean to you. For me, this means presenting thoughtful material to as many people as possible, which includes apologetic engagement.

---------------

With the meteoric rise of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others, we should ask how these modes of computer-mediated social interaction are affecting individuals, groups, and culture at large. One may have hundreds of Facebook “friends,” but what kind of friends are they? And what kind of “community” is Facebook and related social media outlets? What are the beneficial elements of social media and what are its dangers? Consider two episodes that highlight the strengths and weakness of this new medium.

In May of 2006, a woman left her expensive cell phone in a New York City cab. Rather than giving it up for lost, she used various social media to trigger a massive campaign for her cell phone to be returned. The person who found the woman’s cell phone initially communicated his refusal to return it by sending a nasty e-mail message, but he was eventually pressured to give it back when the case was made widely known. The recovery of the woman’s phone would have been impossible apart from the connections available through social media. This highlights new forms of social association and action that would have been impossible previously. Political demonstrations in repressive regimes have been organized in this way as well.1

On another occasion, a man decides to use a Facebook post to vent his pent-up frustrations against someone he knows. He attacks the person’s character and issues false charges. Although both he and the person he vilifies are Christians, he fails to communicate first with that person about his complaints (see Matt. 18:15–20). Instead, he issues a broadside in a media environment where all his “friends” can read the post. This takes gossip to a whole new (social media) level. Feelings are hurt, lies are broadcast, and no one is the better for it.

FACEBOOK, THEOLOGY, AND THE NATURE OF TECHNOLOGY

Although there are other forms of social media, we will concentrate on the strengths and weaknesses of Facebook, given its size and influence. The ascent of Facebook has been remarkable. During the first quarter of 2009, five million people joined Facebook every week. From August 2008 to March 2009, its membership doubled from one hundred million to two hundred million and the vast majority of its members (140 million) have joined since February of 2007.2 Facebook has rapidly generated a spontaneous ordering of human communication that is unique in history.

Internet technologies have swiftly changed cultures around the world through their speed, availability, and new contexts for information exchange, whether through text, audio, still images, or video. The rise of social networking has raised significant questions about the meaning and experience of community in the digital domain. Christians believe in authoritative principles for human flourishing designed by God. Therefore, they should be especially concerned with how these new and nearly ubiquitous technologies are shaping ourselves and our society. If the greatest commandment is to love God with all of our being and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matt. 22:37–39), then it behooves us to discern the strengths and weaknesses of these technologies and “hold on to the good” while avoiding “every kind of evil” (1 Thess. 5:21–22).3 The place to start is at the beginning—the beginning of humanity. Only this framework is large enough to give us discernment regarding the wise use of these media.

Human beings, as image-bearers of God, are social creatures. We were designed by a loving God to demonstrate love for God and for others. In this context, we are to develop God’s good creation for human flourishing and God’s pleasure. The first man, even before the Fall, would have been lonely and incomplete without another image-bearer of God who was fitted to be his partner and lover. Although put into a garden of goodness with unrestricted fellowship with God (Gen. 1–2), our first parents listened to the lie of the serpent, opting to go their own way by doing the one thing that God had forbidden: eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3).

Despite our wounded, fractured, and fragile existence in a world east of Eden, God has not abandoned us to our own devices and despair. Rather, He pursues errant mortals by revealing Himself in creation and in conscience (Ps. 19:1–6; Rom. 1–2), through prophets, miracles, and supremely through sending His one and only Son, Jesus Christ (Heb. 1). God commissions His people to disciple nations according to His teaching, since He has all authority in heaven and on earth (Matt. 28:18–20). As agents of God’s Kingdom, Christians should discern the results of the Fall and advance redemptive strategies to lead people to Christ and to encourage social interaction that furthers God’s shalom (peace and flourishing for the creation under God). As Jesus said:

"You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven" (Matt. 5:13–16).

To be salt and light requires an understanding of culture and its effects on us all. We should be like the tribe of Issachar, “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron. 12:32).

Human culture is multifaceted, variable, complex, and often invisible. Put simply, culture is the mark that humans make on nature and on each other (see Gen. 1:26; Ps. 8). However, that mark may be blended into our lives in ways that we hardly notice. Competent cultural criticism brings the cultural background into the foreground, as Marshall McLuhan observed. This allows us to discern what is typically out of view.

The unique human touch takes manifold forms— involving the sartorial, the architectural, the orchestral, the automotive, and so on—and extends to various discursive communicative media such as spoken language, smoke signals, forms of signage, and written language. More recently, it has included electronically mediated communications, such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and Internet. The latter has afforded us, in a very short time, a plethora of possibilities for communication, from e-mail to text messaging to blogs to what is now called “social networking,” a phenomenon that occurs on the Internet by broadening the kinds of computer-mediated social contact offered by e-mail, blogs, or Web pages. This creates a digital agora, but with no one there in the flesh. Bodies are absent, but interaction is very present in this new electronic forum.

In his insightful book, The Church of Facebook, Jesse Rice repeatedly emphasizes that new technologies produce unforeseen and unique effects. Radical new patterns of association emerge. He sets forth three principles at work with social networking technologies and structures the book around them. (1) There is a force that is capable of synchronizing a large population in very little time, thereby creating spontaneous order. (2) This spontaneous order can generate outcomes that are entirely new and unpredictable. (3) These unpredictable outcomes require the affected population to adapt their behavior to more adequately live within the new spontaneously generated order.4

To put this in Neil Postman’s terms, technological change produces “ecological” effects that go beyond minor adjustments in a culture.5 For example, television changed American culture economically, politically, and intellectually. It was not merely another medium added to newspapers, the telegraph, and radio. Thus, political debates in American politics went from being intellectually robust exchanges, often lasting for hours, to televised events in which the one with the best looks and one-liners wins.6 In fact, Postman claims that the sensibilities fostered by television affect our very sense of truth and falsity. This observation could be extended to say that all forms of electronic communication shape our ways of approaching and understanding the world. It therefore seems important to explore some basic cautions in navigating this new world before giving some specific principles for engagement.

SOME BASIC CAUTIONS

Facebook and related social media tend to foster the overexposure of the underdeveloped self by facilitating the mass distribution of text and images related to oneself. The problem is that one may expose a self that is not mature enough for that exposure. As the Book of Proverbs so often says, the wise hold their peace, but fools proclaim their folly. One should choose confidants carefully (see Ps. 1). Some aspects of one’s life should be concealed. There is much folly, frivolity, and triviality in social networking. Not everyone should know everything about everyone. While secrecy wrongly conceals vices or wrongdoing, confidentiality is prudent because it shields things that need to be kept out of view. Social networking makes the broad distribution of text and image virtually effortless, and many lack the discretion required to hold their peace. One Facebook post lamented that a woman’s husband had treated her harshly in a way that never happened while they were dating. This was a cry of pain, but Facebook was not the place to air it. This confidence belonged in a marital discussion, in prayer, and perhaps in a pastor or counselor’s office.

One should also be careful of gossip. Given the nature of Facebook, gossip can spread rapidly and widely. Gossip can be defined as repeating unfavorable things about people for no good reason. Biblically understood, gossip is sinful and should be repented of. Some of the statements may be true, but they are unedifying and without constructive purpose.7 Paul includes gossip in several of his “sin lists,” putting it alongside adultery, murder, and so on (Rom. 1:29; 2 Cor. 12:20).

Moreover, there is a time to retreat from words entirely, as the Preacher of Ecclesiastes warns: “The more the words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?” (Eccl. 6:11; see also 5:1–2). The same is true for images. Many Facebook users recklessly post photographs of themselves in immodest and/or narcissistic poses. Even innocent photographs may be misunderstood given the often-ambiguous nature of the image. Facebook comments and images have come back to haunt their authors, as when potential employers assess the Facebook pages of those they are considering hiring.

What is called social media may become profoundly antisocial. Some who are immersed in social media prefer such media over face-to-face encounters. This furthers the technological problem of “the absent present”: although someone may be right next to you, she is immersed in her cell phone, Blackberry, iPod, or laptop. For example, students in the classroom may use their laptops to take notes or perhaps look up something related to the lecture. As a teacher, I have found that quite often students are not using their laptops in these ways, however, but are doing any number of other things online, including checking social networking sites such as Facebook and eHarmony.

Many students are prone to this, since they have grown up with multitasking as a habit. The idea of undivided attention strikes them as strange and uninviting. But trying to divide one’s attention between the classroom (the lecture, student comments, the textbook) and social media impoverishes the classroom, vitiating it of its unique possibilities for learning through lecture and dialogue. John Medina argues that the brain itself is incapable of multitasking effectively, whether in the classroom or elsewhere.8 For these reasons, I have banned laptops from my classes at Denver Seminary and have added the following comment to my syllabi: “No laptops are allowed in the classroom. While many students will use them responsibly, many will disappear behind the screens. For this reason, I am banning them from the classroom. The classroom needs to be a zone for knowledge and inspiration. Knowledge needs students and students need knowledge. We need to breathe ideas together without the distraction of alien mediation. Therefore, please print out the class notes for the day and be ready to take notes and discuss the material face-to-face, voice-to-voice, soul-to-soul.”9 I find that the unmediated classroom is far better than one mediated by computers and their manifold distractions.

PRINCIPLES FOR ENGAGEMENT

Rice recommends several specific principles for using Facebook, which I have adapted somewhat and to which I will add some of my own:

1. Practice regular check-ins. Since social media can induce “out-of-body experiences” (digital interactions apart from personal presence), we should monitor ourselves in the midst of using Facebook or similar technologies. What are we feeling and thinking? How are we responding to this world? Given the hyperconnectedness that Facebook affords, it is easy to get swept into the data flow without being mindful of what is happening on the screen and in the soul. Think of Jesus’ admonition, “Therefore consider carefully how you listen” (Luke 8:18), which applies to Facebook as well as to face-to-face situations. Many people post immodest photographs of themselves online. If we tend to ogle such photographs, we should not; we should repent of this. This may mean not perusing online photo albums— or it may mean getting off of Facebook entirely. Jesus was very serious about this particular sin:

"You have heard that it was said, “Do not commit adultery.” But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell" (Matt. 5:27–32).

2. Resolve not to go online immediately before bed or immediately after waking up. These significant times of the day should be reserved to memorize Scripture, meditate on it, and pray (See Ps. 119). One should start well and end well.

3. Practice authentic Facebook engagement. Facebook caters to narcissism, with many people presenting flattering images of, and words about, themselves that are unreal. Therefore, we should evaluate the “presentation of self in everyday life” on Facebook.10 Does the content we post reflect our God-given nature? Are we being authentically ourselves here, or are we hyperactive and hyperconnected pretenders? God knows: “For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil” (Eccl. 12:14).

4. Focus on one or two Facebook friends for one month for special involvement. One’s involvement in Facebook can become more meaningful by picking just a few people to focus on, instead of distributing one’s attention more widely but superficially. Keep your other friends, but pay special attention to these souls. Pray for them; send messages only for them; post photographs with them that are meaningful, and so on. Then consider whether this has deepened your relationship with them.

These four recommendations are sane and solid. I often challenge people to develop a philosophy of Facebook to guide their involvement, and Rice’s encouragement should spur reflection. On the basis of my experience with Facebook, let me commend three other principles.

5. Practice skeptical Facebook activities. Just as one might give a false impression of oneself through doctored photos or hyped-up words, one should realize that others are likely doing the same thing. In other words, Facebook may not be the best source to fathom someone’s character or skills. The image presented may not be the reality reflected by the person herself. It is unwise to grant very much trust to someone only known through Facebook, especially given all the scams and frauds out there.

6. Abstain from Facebook or other social media if you find yourself obsessing on it or if your interaction is bearing bad fruit in your life. One’s spouse can be a savvy observer for this. It is easy to lose track of time or not notice what so much time online is doing to one’s character. If a spouse or another trusted person is concerned about your involvement, hear them out and take stock of your situation before God. According to the Book of Proverbs, one of the qualities of a friend is their willingness to challenge the attitudes and behavior of the one he or she cares about. “Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses” (Prov. 27:6).11

7. Decide carefully what a Facebook “friend” means to you. There are at least two schools of thought on this. On the one hand, the Facebook user may retain a more biblical meaning of the word friend and allow only those people with whom he or she has a significant relationship. This principle will cut down on the volume of “friends,” but increase the quality of the interaction. On the other hand, someone may want a large audience for one’s posts. If so, a “friend” does not mean someone existentially significant, but rather a person who may benefit from what one posts. I have adopted the latter strategy. Because I am a teacher, I endeavor to use this forum to educate and edify people through my own pithy comments (sometimes in the form of aphorisms or epigrams); quotations from Scripture, classic literature, or philosophy; and links to thoughtful articles or (more rarely) videos. I keep personal comments to a minimum in order to avoid self-absorption, and because I have a larger base of Facebook friends than those who limit Facebook friends to “real-life friends.”

In some cases, I am able to have meaningful interaction with strangers who are Facebook “friends.” Recently, a troubled young Christian from Asia sent me an instant message about her fear of betraying Christ and never getting free of sins that hinder her obedience to God. Although her English writing was rough, I tried to understand her plight, sympathize with her, and offer her biblical counsel. We exchanged messages for about fifteen minutes and I assured her I would pray for her and that she could contact me if I could be of further help. While this kind of interaction is far removed from real pastoral counseling or the accountability of a small group, it seemed that I was able to offer this troubled soul some spiritual substance through Facebook. As a Christian philosopher, I also seek to defend the truth and rationality of the Christian worldview wherever I find a healthy opportunity to do so, even if it is on Facebook (1 Peter 3:15–16). If I sense in the Facebook interlocutor a genuine interest in my arguments, I will continue to interact. But if there is flippancy and belligerence (all too common in social media), I disengage, not wanting to “cast pearls before swine,” as Jesus said in Matthew 7:6.

VIRTUAL CHURCH?

Some engage social media outside of these boundaries. Some even advocate social media as a form for the church meeting itself. One author proposes “SimChurch,” in which people congregate not in the flesh, but in virtual environments through the use of avatars (graphic digital identities).12 In the summer of 2009, I was on a BBC radio program with someone who pioneered “Saint Pixels Church,” which caters to those who want their fellowship virtual instead of embodied. But I argued that those who sponsor such innovations have a deficient view of culture, the body, and the church.

Given that human culture is fallen (James 1:27; 1 John 2:15–17), we must not embrace every innovation that emanates from the innards of a computer. Some things that can be done ought not to be done. As Paul said, “‘Everything is permissible for me’—but I will not be mastered by anything” (1 Cor. 6:12). While I cannot here offer a broader critique of the use of avatars in virtual worlds,13 we should consider that virtual representations of one’s self typically do not correspond very closely to the person behind them. One may argue that this masquerade is allowable in some entertainment settings (virtual or otherwise), but the virtual self should not be embraced carte blanche. Leaving one’s body behind (as one does in SimChurch or St. Pixels) allows for numerous cartoon-like possibilities, but it does not honor the biblical understanding of fellowship.

Both the apostle Paul and the apostle John longed to be physically with the people to whom they wrote their Epistles. Consider the words of Paul as he began to pen the Book of Romans: “I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong—that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith” (Rom. 1:11–12). Although Paul was writing some of the most profound theology imaginable, he still desired to be together with those in the Roman church. The apostle John affirmed the same: “I have much to write to you, but I do not want to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to visit you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12; see also 3 John 13–14).

The most profound elements of church life are not possible online, since they are embodied. One cannot offer “the right hand of fellowship” through an avatar, nor can one partake of communion or baptism, the laying on of hands, the anointing with oil, or corporate worship—all constitutive parts of church life and fellowship. Whatever our social media involvement may be, we must not let it eclipse the God-ordained structures of the local church.

SOCIAL MEDIA: LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES

Social media provide fast, far-reaching, and free interaction with a huge number of people. Yet we should not become intoxicated with this rapidly expanding and easily addicting social world. While it offers the benefits of interaction with those outside of our general vicinity and can be used to communicate the truth in love (Eph. 4:15), it lacks significant elements of meaningful friendship that are found only through more embodied interactions. It can never substitute for the local church. However, if used intentionally, prayerfully, and with restraint, it can add a new dimension to our social interactions that might otherwise not be possible.

NOTES

1 Clay Shirkey, “It Takes a Village to Find a Phone,” in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2009), chap. 1.

2 Jesse Rice, The Church of Facebook (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2009). For my review of this book in Denver Journal, see: 

http://www.denverseminary.edu/article/the-church-of-facebook-how-the-hyperconnected-are-redefining-community.

3 All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version.

4 Rice, 20–21.

5 Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 18.

6 See Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 1985).

7 See Melody Green, “Gossip!” at: http://www.lastdaysministries.org/Mobile/default.aspxgroup_id=1000040808&article_id=1000008545. This was originally published as a tract by Last Days Ministries in the early 1980s.

8 John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Seattle: Pear Press, 2008), chap. 4.

9 See Douglas Groothuis, “Banning Laptops from the Classroom,” The Teaching Professor, March 2010.

10 This is the title of an influential book by sociologist Erving Goffman, first published in 1959.

11 For a biblical study on the meaning of friendship in the Book of Proverbs, see Ajith Fernando, Reclaiming Friendship (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991).

12 Doug Estes, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009).

13 I take this up in The Soul in Cyberspace (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1997). However, the technological involvements have far exceeded what I discussed there. Nevertheless, the basic principles I used to critique the technologies then available are still applicable today.

Source: Douglas Groothuis, Ph.D., is professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary and the author of many books on apologetics. This article first appeared in the Christian Research Journal, volume 33, number 03 (2010).