Thursday, July 13, 2006

consuming Christianity

Gospel in a post-Christian society is the next course I teach at Bible College of New Zealand; starting Wednesday 26 July, the course runs for 3hours over 14 weeks. Each year I adjust and tweak my courses and this year the emphasis will be on what the gospel might mean in our consumptive and consumeristic world.

I am using this book – A to Z of postmodern life – as a core text;
atoz.jpg firstly, because as a sociologist the author allows us to explore postmodernity not only as a philosophical problem but as it occurs among people. Secondly, the author is non-Western and the book is a critical voice on the impact of postmodernity on global culture. And thirdly, because the book explores postmodern in everyday life: advertising to zapping, toys to shopping. And it is precisely in how we live and spend money that the gospel needs to engage us.

For those interested, a fuller bibliography is as follows:


Tom Beaudoin. Consuming faith: Integrating Who We Are with What We Buy, Sheed & Ward: US, 2004.

John Drane. McDonaldisation of the Church: Spirituality, Creativity, and the Future of the Church. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2000.

John Drane. Do Christians know how to be spiritual??: The Rise of New Spirituality and the Mission of the Church, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2005.

Gordon Lynch. After religion: ‘Generation X’ and the Search for Meaning. London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 2002.

Brian McLaren. A new kind of Christian, Jossey-Bass, 2001.

Brian McLaren. Generous Orthodoxy, Zondervan, 2004.

Brian McLaren. Secret Message of Jesus, 2006,

Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh. Truth is stranger than it used to be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age. London: SPCK, 1995.

Vincent Miller. Consuming religion: Christian Faith And Practice in a Consumer Culture, Continuum, 2005.

Ziauddin Sardar. A to Z of postmodern life: Essays on Global Culture in the Noughties, Vision: London, 2002.

Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism and the other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture. London; Sterling, Victoria: Pluto Press, 1998.

Steve Taylor, out of bounds church?: Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change, Zondervan: US, 2004.

Andrew Walker, Telling the story: Gospel, Mission and Culture Gospel & Culture. London: SPCK, 1996.

Posted by steve at 04:12 PM

1 Comment

  1. Sounds really interesting. In the same vein I read, “The (Magic) Kingdom Of God”… a while back… The blip is:

    In The (Magic) Kingdom of God, Michael Budde offers a multidisciplinary analysis of the “global culture industries”-increasingly powerful, centralized corporate conglomerates in television, advertising, marketing, movies, and the like-and their impact on Christian churches in industrialized…

    Comment by Keith — July 13, 2006 @ 5:22 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.