TTF Staff
Senior Fellow Bill Edgar has a great and important piece on entertainment in ByFaith Online, the online magazine of the PCA.
In an (apparently) undated but recent piece, “Good Company, Good Art, and a Good Laugh,” Bill discusses a Christian perspective on entertainment, suggesting that the real problem with our coarsening culture is related to a failure to fully understand calling and thus work.
These days work is either looked at as pure duty, or, the opposite, a messianic hope. Our modern culture has often turned work into drudgery, a necessary evil. Again, ironically, we reinforce this notion by fast foods and labor-saving devices which claim to make work easier. The more we see how work can be avoided, the more we complain when it has to be done. An equal but opposite error is to exaggerate the value of work. On the left, Karl Marx believed industriousness would yield utopia. On the right, the National Socialists dared to blaspheme: Arbeit macht frei (work makes free), emblazoned over the entrance to Auschwitz. Thus, both the left and the right destroyed the biblical balance—noble-but-flawed.
As a result, something had to be done to bring relief. Leisure! . . . [W]e need more time. But time without a purpose soon yields boredom.
The key, he suggests, is a recovery of true entertainment. Work isn’t all there is. “Life is not utilitarian. It is about the grace of God.”
Worth your time!
Sightings, Arts and Culture, Meaning and Calling, Thu 16 Feb 2006
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of a man you are, for it shows me what your ideal of manhood is, and what kind of man you long to be.
Thomas Carlyle
