Faith and Pop Culture

I just finished reading Faith and Pop Culture, a Bible Study guide edited by Kelli Trujillo and put out as a part of the Christianity Today Study Series.  The focus of the study is to engage thought and provoke discussion about the relationship between our faith and the culture that we live in.  The guide takes on topics that are relevant, focusing mainly on forms of entertainment including television, movies, sports, and literature. 

I liked the format of each study as it used editorials and articles from Christianity Today to start to engage the issues.  It also had a strong section on Biblical passages that need to be studied around the issues that were raised.  I found the best chapter to be the last (which I think should probably have come first) on our culture’s obsession with being entertained.  The rest of the studies were interesting and thought provoking, but would have benefitted from asking the questions of the last study as a foundation to actual critique.  The weakest study was the one on sports.  While I see the value of sports in regards to health and social development, I felt that the attempt to link the concept of Sabbath with competitive sports as they exist in our culture today was too big of a stretch.  

In a nutshell I found most of the studies thought provoking and well written but it was hard to escape the nagging sense that at times we try too hard to make the Scripture compatible with what we know as culture instead of allowing it to critique culture, calling us to live as citizens of a different Kingdom.