Kenneth A. Myers > Quotes

“Culture has very much to do with the human spirit. What we find beautiful or entertaining or moving is rooted in our spiritual life. ”
― Kenneth A. Myers, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture

“In observing the Sabbath, man was culturally structuring his time in accordance with a holy pattern. This was part of his cultural commision, along with the task of being an architect of space by tending the Garden. Space and time were thus consecrated by man's original culture.”
― Kenneth A. Myers, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture

“Until our bodies are made new, like the body Jesus now enjoys, our calling is not to escape fleshly existence, nor to sanctify culture (since it is "common," shared by believer and unbeliever, and cannot be made holy), but to so influence our culture as to make it more consistent with the created nature of man, and to sanctify our own lives, because we are also living in the Spirit, with our minds set on things that are above.”
― Kenneth A. Myers, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture

“If our cultural lives are sick, it is likely to be an impediment to our spiritual lives. Much popular culture promotes a spirit of restlessness. That is likely to be an obstacle to prayer, to concerned reflection, and to attentiveness to the needs of others. Popular culture also has an extremely limited range of sensibilities. I have never heard a work of popular music that has the depth of poignancy of the opening bars of Brahms's 'German Requiem,' for example, with its text, 'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.' I learn something about mourning when I hear Brahms; I know of no similar lessons in popular music.”
― Kenneth A. Myers, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture

“intrinsically vulgar, depraved, or morbid. That’s as may be. “Using” is inferior to “reception” because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.7”
― Kenneth A. Myers, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Turning Point Christian Worldview)