This entry is Part 3 in a series called Commercialism and Faith. The series aims to make us more aware of why we think the way we think and behave the way we behave, giving us a perspective from which we can live a more enlightened life, free of the trappings of consumer addiction. In my last entry, I mentioned that this next entry would be about Christ as a product. But I thought I’d cover ritual first. I’ll be [...]
This is the second post in a series called Commercialism and Faith, in which I will explore the relationship between the language of our culture (commercialism) and how we view and relate to God.
Advertisers often play on something psychologists call Loss Aversion. Loss Aversion is an aspect of Prospect Theory, a theory that seeks to determine why people make certain decisions. Loss Aversion suggests people are more motivated to avoid losing something than they are to acquire something new. [...]
This is the first post in a series called Commercialism and Faith, in which I will explore the relationship between the language of our culture (commercialism) and how we view and relate to God.
This series is not a knock against commercialism as much as it is an exploration of the effects of the cultural language on how we think about the world and specifically how we think about God. Commercials are
simply an exchange of information about the availability of products and services. The idea [...]
Thursday of this week this entire blog will change. It will have a new look, a new user interface, a resource center where you can get lectures (both video and audio) and more strategic content.
I will be launching the new blog with a series called Commercialism and Faith. Every few days I will drop a new entry, each building on the previous. In this series I’ll be talking about the affects of advertising on your brain, and how standard, [...]
It was a pretty good year for movies considering there is no money in Hollywood. I think The Hurt Locker was the best movie of the year, followed by An Education. Jeff Bridges did a great job in Crazy Heart (and the music by T-Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham was terrific) but overall I felt like that movie was creepy. Perhaps Jeff Bridges did too good of a job portraying a washed-up-drunk-country-singer turned babysitter. Up in the Air was [...]
It seems people are having a hard time uploading their movies to the contest site. I removed some duplicates, and now only one film is working. If your film is not working, please remove it and try again. And forgive me for housing the contest on a site that doesn’t seem to be doing what it was designed to do. If anybody out there works with Wildfire and can help, please let me know. I will keep you [...]
Recently I started reading the New Testament again. My friend Ron Frost recommends reading the Bible all the way through, then reading it again, and then again, until you die. So I am taking his advice. And I’m enjoying it. I didn’t start in Genesis this time, I started in Matthew, and so read the account of the Birth of Christ.
Each time I read the Bible I’m taken aback by how much we dilute the power of its stories [...]
If you’ve read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and want to know more about the elements of story as they pertain to writing, I’ve got a DVD series called Into the Elements in which, in a little over four hours, I go through how the elements work in both fiction and non-fiction. It’s a great series for writers, bloggers and even speakers. We filmed the series here in Portland, at the historic Hollywood Theater. You can learn [...]
Not long ago I was having a conversation with a friend who happened to be a Christian. My friend is a writer, and a very smart man. During the conversation, I noticed he kept explaining why he was right. I wanted to test him a bit, I suppose, so I asked him a hard question, essentially, seeing if he would be vulnerable and admit he was human and made mistakes. My friend looked uncomfortable and answered the question carefully, [...]
A couple months ago a friend came through town because his band was playing a show at the Crystal Ballroom. We got breakfast at his favorite spot in Portland (Mother’s Bistro) and then wandered around downtown where we ended up in a guitar shop. The guys in the band started going through pedals and amps, talking it up with the gearheads in the shop, when my friend turned to me and said “you don’t have anything like this, as a [...]
