Faith and Culture

While wanting to dig deeper into a movie I had just watched, I stumbled onto an interesting Christian website maintained by a place called Damascus Road that seems to be using culture to explore Christian themes and to engage society.

I haven't fully researched it yet, but I'm pretty intrigued. The subtitle on their site is "exploring culture, love, truth, life and God."

There are a number of movies for which they have posted discussion questions and discussion comments on-line. It seems to me these could make for good small group discussions, but I need to add the DISCLAIMER that though the discussion questions and comments are Christian, the films ARE secular, and not all films are appropriate for all audiences! You can find the discussion resources if you scroll down to Cinema and Spirit Resources at

http://www.damascusroadtucson.com/Media.html

Here is a quote from the comments on the film What Dreams May Come

There is a great quote from C.S. Lewis concerning the relation between our life now and the afterlife. He said, “Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And, taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a Heavenly creature or into a hellish creature -- either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.” This quote makes a lot of sense to me. What I do in this life shapes who I will be in the afterlife. If I have lived a life in harmony with God and chosen his way then I will be prepared to experience Heaven. If I have chosen to rebel against God and others, I am not prepared to exist in Heaven but rather Heaven itself may even be a Hell for me because I am so out of sync with reality there. Maybe Hell truly is the horror of a life gone wrong. Maybe it is the realization that life lived without a restored relationship with God and others is the worst Hell that could ever exist.

May you choose life and love and truth with God's help and become the Heavenly creature you were meant to be.


"Now, with God's help, I shall become myself."

- SØren Kierkegaard