D. Brent Laytham > Quotes

“First radio, then television, and now the World Wide Web have migrated entertainment’s public from the social community to the domestic sphere, where further migration from living room to family room, kitchen, and finally bedroom indicate ongoing fragmentation, culminating in isolated audiences of one.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“Sherry Turkle offers wise counsel: “We have to love our technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology’s true effects on us.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“we, the church, are the embodiment of Christ’s compassion, and that he has poured out God’s Spirit on us precisely to activate our just and merciful care.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“So we must ask how widely disparate entertainments shape our sensibilities, cultivate our desires, form our feelings, discipline our bodies, pattern our actions, and determine our relationships.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“Christians who play sports, especially the ones who win a lot, would do well to remember Jesus’s caution not to pray like the hypocrites who love to pray standing in the limelight (Matt 6: 5–6). Christ have mercy.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“On this side of Easter, our playing embodies faith that the crucial work—the work of the cross—has already been done. Play is utterly unnecessary, and as such is a sign and gift of God’s kingdom.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“disciples need something far more substantial than advice from experts; they require ongoing immersion in Scripture and conversation with the saints, ideally saints of their own congregation. Some of these saints will offer wisdom to guide the process of recognition and transformation; others will offer encouragement and accountability.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“the Christian doctrine of incarnation means that bodily life is good, something to be embraced and enjoyed. Our hope in Christ is not that we can finally escape the limitations of bodiliness for the freedom of a purely mental or “spiritual” existence. It is rather that we might be freed from death and sin for a resurrected bodily life that enjoys God forever. If we look at the full trajectory of human life from birth through death to “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” incarnation can be seen as describing the full process of Jesus’ life, and especially his final resurrection fullness, rather than merely a claim that from the beginning this man is God with us.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“Disciples are learners who submit to regimens (like worship and service) and disciplines (like prayer and fasting) for the long haul, as much to find as to fix what is broken in them.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“Gnostic Christianity depreciates our bodiliness, demeans creation and materiality; it sees salvation as release from embodiment. Identified and refuted as a heresy by the same theologian, Irenaeus, gnosticism has nonetheless continued to dog Christianity throughout its existence, continually insinuating that being embodied is some kind of cosmic mistake. The cure for that kind of thinking can certainly be found in the biblical accounts of God’s good creation and of Jesus’s birth, healing ministry, crucifixion, and bodily resurrection, and in the church’s embodied practices of worshiping God and serving neighbor.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“To play is, in some sense, actively to make your own fun. Players are entertaining themselves, whether the play is peekaboo, cards, tennis, or piano.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

“anthropologist Victor Turner’s point about satire more generally: it is essentially conservative in effect, because even as it skewers a particular social folly or political peccadillo, it is implicitly affirming the larger social and political structure that makes both the stupidity and the satire possible.”
― D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment