Yep.

Every culture has a story that tells you this is what should be of ultimate concern.

Paul Tillich, the 20th century theologian said, that's what religion is.

And what we believe is of ultimate concern functions as God in our life.

It may not actually be God, but it functions as God in our life.

So everyone has a religion.

Everyone's religious because we all make decisions about with our time, with our money, The pursuits of what we think should be of ultimate concern.

No, I think what will

Well,

a little bit of autobiographical backstory that might set some context here that's helpful.

So as you mentioned, I spent a lot of time as a worship pastor and was doing prayer room stuff, traveling all over the country.

And during those years, I think one of the things I just became instantly fascinated with was what is happening in this room? And as I would go from different rooms, different denominational contexts, there would be different rules, from room to room, different values, different ways that you worshiped.

And that always stood out to me as like, what's actually going on here? And so- I had that track and I've always, for years I was doing that, but also teaching.

So I had this kind of like academic bent too.

So when I went back to seminary and started studying theology in particular, I got really fascinated with what you could call like theology of culture or cultural theology.

I just picture that happening right here as there's

So what does that mean for all the non-Christopher Nolans?

Yeah.

Well, I think you can be,

there's a case that

could be made.

There's a case that could be made that the cultural impact of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is actually less than Dan Juergens' The Death of Superman comic.

because of the way that the death of superman comic served as a point of inspiration for dozens of other instantiations and and grapplings with that story for a fraction of the cost of production so i think one of the avenues i'm kind of having conversations with people including uh taylor foreman who's a friend of mine is the way in which um Yeah.

And less Somerset

Can you unpack what you think is the nature of the shift that we may be seeing, and what are you seeing that makes you think that this shift is real?

yeah that's a great summary and a great engagement of both sides of maybe the argument on what is actually happening is there something different than what we experienced maybe 10 15 20 years ago i think to drill down beneath that we need to maybe get at what i mean when i say a vibe shift and i think the best way to think about that is to employ a term that might have a lot of baggage, but I'm going to try to give you an analogy that's helpful.

To describe a vibe shift is to describe a spiritual shift that's happening in culture.

And what I mean by spiritual, of course, many of your listeners may come from traditional religious backgrounds and have particular associations with that word, which may not be challenging for them to enter into that.

Some of which may have maybe a degree of cynicism, maybe they're trapped or stuck or have spent much of their life in what I call in the book, the modern story, which is produced in us a more, we're going to sequester the spiritual into this private sphere and make it essentially irrelevant and worthless.

But what I mean by spiritual, maybe the best analogy is something akin to like school spirit.

If you went to high school, normal public high school, or even a private high school in the US, and you had a football team or a basketball team, you know what school spirit is.

How do we do that?

That's eerdmans.com, promo code Culture40

Culture40Yeah.

Okay.

So, I think as we talk about culture, culture gives us...

All cultures have a guiding story.

They have a set of rituals that reinforces or shapes people's souls to step into that story, and they have symbols.

They have symbols that act as icons or windows into that story.

What does it mean to live a good story, a meaningful story? What makes a good, meaningful story that we could start to live into?

Some of these other modern stories floating around, do you have a sense that they've intersected within Christianity in different ways? As in like, you know, Christians aren't immune from these sorts of problems? Well, absolutely.

Yeah.

I think one of the challenges is that in many ways, you know, I was born in 1983 and in many ways there was this sort of synchronicity between the modern story and the Christian story that people actually weren't able to parse out and sift through and realize these aren't exactly the same things.

Now, acknowledging I have a kind of theology of culture that I do believe Christ is present, even working within the modern story.

He's bringing about certain things and highlighting certain things that are good.

I do think the kind of, let's say, work ethic of a Rocky Balboa archetype to say, I am going to work as hard as I can for the good of others, right? I mean, that was Rocky 1.

Rocky 1 actually starts, the opening scene is that the camera pans down to this picture of Christ.

you know, do you have a feeling for how concrete some of this stuff manifests?

and completely untethered and he kept referring to them in this book as part of the post-modernism world and i read that book in the late 90s and it made very little sense to me actually at the time and now as i look back on that term and the times we live in it makes perfect sense to me on the role of post-modernism in the world we live in today so tell our audience what post-modernism means

Yeah, I mean, first, it'd probably be helpful to note the prefix post before modernism, right? And so that gives you a hint as to what, well, if we're talking post modernism, we do need to understand that that world you're describing, let's say, in academia in the 1960s into the late 20th century, right? They were grappling with, and the simplest way I put this is they were grappling with a story, a guiding cultural story that came before them.

And that's the modern story.

So the modern story we could kind of summarize is this story that has been in many ways core to the American identity because the American Revolution Project was born out of the modern story and it valued things like individualism.

So the notion that the individual has access to the truth and doesn't have to go through institutions, whether it was church or government, that you have access to the truth.

That was a unique idea that emerged in this modern story.

You also had values like meritocracy.

How do I, as a listener, laying out of the pool right now here in this conversation or driving the kids to school or getting a workout in or whatever else I'm doing while they're listening to this conversation, apply what you're talking about in my

I'm

optimistic because over the last few years, I've started to see rumblings of a spiritual shift in our culture, especially among young people, especially among Gen Z people.

who have seen how, especially younger Gen Xers and millennials, have kind of lived in this meaning crisis.

And they're exhausted.

They're exhausted with nihilism.

And so there's an attraction.

In some of the weirdest places, Eric, you can see signs of this.

Why do I resonate with this moment of innocence? What is that? And when you