Artists and culture
“It’s fallacious to say that art in our culture used to specifically focus on glorifying God. When would we say the shift occurred? Was the goal of the ancient Greeks’ Dionysian festivals honoring the God of the Bible? . . . Even Shakespeare had his share of lewd humor. . . .

“We like to think that nowadays our world is morally looser than it ever was, but societal morality seems to flow in cycles. . . . Take the Romans and their idea of sports (or literal death matches), for example. People bemoan the prevalence of homosexuality in today’s culture and forget that the Greeks believed the highest form of love existed between a man and a boy. . . .

“A culture that emphasizes ‘pessimism and despair’ will produce art that reflects that world view, and rightly so. Modernism was a reaction to industrialization and World War I: the world had changed—drastically. . . . As T.S. Eliot put it, the 19th century’s ideas of order and tradition couldn’t stand against ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’ In this new paradigm, artists broke with the past—with old notions of order—as did areas as divergent as science and philosophy.

“Art is not created in a vacuum; it is always a response, sometimes slightly ahead, sometimes slightly behind, but never without context. If we study a culture’s art, we can begin to understand its people, for our art is a reflection of who we are. As Christians our challenge is to bring hope to a lost world, not just lament its darkness. As artists, our challenge is to create work with honesty and integrity — work that questions and communicates truth. For those of us who are both, we must integrate the hope we have into our body of work, if not each specific piece. . . . And if our society changes, our art will as well.

—Dawn Xiana Moon, singer-songwriter, on www.relevantmagazine.com.

Meet us at Wal-Mart!
If your college’s or university’s home community doesn’t offer much for students to do late at night, where will you go? The local Wal-Mart, according to the Wall Street Journal. “From scavenger hunts and aisle football to a relay race limbo under the shopping cart stand, college students around the country—particularly in rural areas—have found Wal-Mart’s endless aisles and 24-hour operations to be perfect for middle-of-the-night romps.” Games include A-Z, in which students race to find 26 items each starting with a different letter of the alphabet, and 10 in 10, in which each team has ten minutes to fill its cart with ten items. After the teams switch carts, teams race to see which can return all the items in the cart to their proper spots first.

—National On-Campus Report, March 5, 2005.

Minority SAT scores climb
While the overall SAT scores for the class of 2004 remained flat from last year’s class, several minority groups saw their averages increase. Mexican-American students saw a nine point increase, while “other Hispanic” students reported a five point increase. American Indian scores also reported a nine point increase and Asian students gained one. Scores for black students remained flat while white students saw a four point drop.

—Associated Press, August 31, 2004, quoted in the Ivy Jungle Campus Ministry Update, December 2004.

XXXChurch
Two California pastors, Craig Gross and Mike Foster, have created a ministry that almost always turns heads. XXXChurch.com is an outreach to men and women struggling with pornography addiction. Their approach is unique in that their Web site generates traffic from those searching for material; but instead of racy photos, their site offers accountability and hope. They combine “technology, self-promotion, sensationalism, and humor” to address what they see as one of the greatest problems in modern society. More than 100,000 have downloaded their accountability software, 3XWatch, which e-mails an accountability partner a list of all the Web sites a user visits. They believe that this kind of accountability will be more effective than any content filter.

—New York Times, October 31, 2004.

Religion: it’s a good thing
Is the world better off for the presence of religions? Keith Ward, Gresham Professor of Divinity, Gresham College, London, says, “It is pointless to condemn politics or science because they are so widely misused; instead it is necessary to insure that they are used for good. Similarly, it’s pointless to condemn religion because religion is not the cause of hatred and violence. It can be used to inspire hatred, but it can also be used to inspire heroic love and commitment. The world would be much poorer without Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi,and Mother Teresa; without Mozart, Bach, Rubens, and Michelangelo; without St. Francis, Siddhartha Guatama, and Jesus. . . .”

—Quoted by Martin Marty in Context, February 2005.