Is image everything? For many people in our culture, image and images are everything. Americans spend hours watching television but rarely finish a good book. Words are quickly losing their appeal.
Arthur Hunt sees this trend as a direct assault on Christianity. He warns that by exalting imagery we risk becoming mindless pagans. Our thirst for images has dulled our minds so that we lack the biblical and mental defenses we need to resist pagan influences.
What about paganism? Hunt contends that it never died in modern Western culture; image-based media just brought it to the surface again. Sex, violence, and celebrity worship abound in our culture, driving a mass media frenzy reminiscent of pagan idolatry.
This book is a clear warning that the church is being cut off from its word-based heritage, and that we are open to abuse by those who exploit the image but neglect the Word. Thoughtful readers will find this a challenging call to be critical about the images bombarding our sense and to affirm that "the Word is everything."
"Because the cultural back alleys my writing sometimes takes me into, I have to read a lot of books on Christian engagement with culture. That said, The Vanishing Word is one of the best on this subject I have ever read--it is memorable, prescient, pithy, courageous, wise, and . . . in the hope this word is still legal, right."
---Douglas Wilson, Christ Church, Moscow, Idaho
Vanishing Word, The is in the following collections:
