Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Milla Jovovich's Daughter Baptized Russian Orthodox (photos)


May 27, 2015

You can take the girl out of Russia, but you can’t take the Russia out of the girl.

Milla Jovovich has been giving her Instagram followers an inside look at daughter Dashiel Edan‘s traditional Russian Orthodox baptism ceremony, which took place Friday at the Holy Transfiguration Russian Orthodox church in Los Angeles.

Friday, May 22, 2015

The Myth of a Postmodern Era


By Mark Sayers

For the last ten to fifteen years a great fallacy has clouded debate around the future of the Church in the West. The fallacy goes something like this. At some stage (depending on who you talk to), but most likely in the nineteen nineties the post modern era began. All of a sudden everything changed and a line was drawn in history. On one side were the postmodernists and on the other the modernists. The modernists were enslaved to a highly cerebral, hegemonic view of the world. They were obsessed with progress and holding the world at a cold calculated distance. They were beholden to technology, and if they were religious were either dogmatic fundamentalists or materialist liberals. They hated anything non-Western or from the past, and lived in Le Corbusier designed buildings where they almost suffocated on their own sense of hubris.

Then there was the postmodernists and apparently they were coming so we had to be ready, or had to become postmodern ourselves. The young were postmodern and the future was postmodern. The postmodernists were everything that the modernists were not, they loved spirituality instead of religion, were embracing of the non-West, the past, and anything experiential. They had piercings and hated objective truth. The implications were clear, soon Western culture would morph into a giant rave where we would find ourselves dancing to tribal techno with an dreadlocked Austrian backpacker/Yoga practitioner named Helga.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

The New Religion of Body Improvement


By Jeremy Biles
27 May 2010
Ekklesia

“The worldwide pursuit of body improvement has become like a new religion,” says photographer Zed Nelson in the introduction to his latest book, Love Me.

His photos therein depict in loving, lurid detail evidences of bodily fanaticism around the globe – a preposterously muscled bodybuilder in Las Vegas, prosthetic nose implants in Beijing, the winner of a maximum-security-prison beauty pageant in Rio. But do these photos really point toward a “new religion”?

There’s reason to think so. In fact, though the pursuit of bodily perfection is a global phenomenon, its roots may lie partly in American religion.

Monday, May 11, 2015

John Lennon and the Cult of Celebrity


John W. Whitehead
December 7, 2010
Christian Post

"I have to cut through the mask even if it's self-created." - John Lennon

It should come as no surprise that when the appeal of traditional religion began to fade, mass entertainment rushed into the vacuum. In fact, pop culture and the temporal values of entertainment effectively compete with those of religion to such an extent that celebrity has increasingly become the religion of our consumer society. "And fans are the mystical adepts of this religion," write Judy and Fred Vemorel in their book Starlust, "who dramatize moods, fantasies and expectations we all share."

Despite his own cult status, John Lennon, who was gunned down 30 years ago, spent the latter part of his short life attempting to undermine the cult of celebrity.