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Social media and gaming and Netflix binging — the whole spectacle age is all built on one lie: If you give more of your life to your screens, you will become more satisfied. And that’s a false promise. It will never deliver. Biz: You’ve both been confronted with people being rude about the fact that you’re making music about things they don’t think a woman should make music about. Our spiritual affections, once dead, are now alive. Those reborn affections are made for Christ. And this is not natural and it’s not automatic — it’s supernatural grace, calling for life discipline. We keep working at this until we can affirm with Peter — in 1 Peter 1:8 — that even though we have not seen Christ — we have not yet beheld the spectacle of his transfigured presence — we now love him with a love that fills our hearts with joy, a joy we cannot put into words. Great, Big Lie Hebrews 1 is one of my favorite portraits of Christ, in the glory of his atoning sacrifice for sinners. Hebrews 1 ranks up there with Colossians 1 in offering us a Spectacle of the supremacy and majesty of God’s Son. In fact, Hebrews 1 is so compelling that it calls for urgent application. And so, we return again to Hebrews 2:1: I have a few takeaways and thoughts on what this means for our own lives and for how we lead Sunday gatherings. But first let’s open God’s word together to Hebrews 2:1. The writer of Hebrews says this:
There are many temptations church leaders face to make the Sunday gatherings of the church as visibly spectacular as possible. The church, having been tempted to appeal to the spectacle industry, starts taking on the vibe of a theater: lasers and neon lights and sermon trailer videos and fog machines. We can over-index on visual production. We want to be excellent in what we do (yes, absolutely) and we want to be creative too (certainly) all while being careful not to leave the impression that we’re simply trying to impress eyes. No! The work of ministry is to persuade hearts — through the ear — to treasure unseen realities. And like I suggested earlier, this is a problem even with morally virtuous media. By them we can easily drift and grow bored with Christ. This is tragic because all of creation exists by Christ and for Christ, we are told in Hebrews 2:10. To be bored with Christ is for our minds and hearts to be disconnected from the greatest thrill of the cosmos, severed from God’s very purpose for this creation — as a theater to display the worth and beauty of his Son. There’s no greater catastrophic loss imaginable to a soul than to grow weary of Christ, the Spectacle of all spectacles — the spectacle for which everything else exists. And this catastrophe, I fear, is only accelerated in a media age like our own that inundates us with digital media 24/7/365. Attentional Drift We’re regressing in a way. I think the mainstream media has a lot to do with that—they don’t focus on positive stories. When they decide to focus on [sex], it’s either done in the same way that it’s always been done, in a negative light, or it’s done as a marketing tool to say, ‘Yeah, we support queer people.’Isabella Lovestory: Sex is everywhere, and to say otherwise is just maintaining shame about it. Aesthetically, I love eroticism and the darkness [of sexuality].
brunettes blondes women beach high heels digital desire magazine sunny leone 2000 Nature Beaches HD Art Isabella: Rebellion was always inside of me. I was a troubled child, and I had a problem with authority in school. I wanted to do it my way. That’s always been part of my philosophy and personality, being rebellious at heart. Playing with the cross and [Christian] iconography, it’s fun to have humor with those stereotypes. Biz: You have both been photographed by Richard Kern, who’s well known for his explorations of female eroticism. This conversation is happening at an interesting time, especially in relation to his work, because we’re living in an unprecedented era in terms of image-making, the female erotic, and ownership of those images. A great example of this is the massive success and impact of OnlyFans, which speaks to a shift in who owns the means of production and distribution for images that activate desire. What does desire look like in this accelerated hyper-digital world?
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I’m trying to be the star I was envisioning, or the girl I needed, when I was young.”—Isabella Lovestory Many of us know how this dynamic works from the inside. We make our own spectacles online in social media, little spectacles that we hope will grab some attention. In them we implicitly want to be celebrated, heart-ed, liked, shared, retweeted. We are hoping for something in return. Listening here means a lot more than casually tuning in for a moment or two before we switch off again. It means real listening, intense listening, listening which hurts. It means attentive straining after what is said, giving ourselves wholly to the task of attention to Jesus. Why? Because he is God’s Word, he is what God says to us. ( Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian, 96)
Sasha: I think, culturally, we’re living in a moment I’ve dubbed stripper chic. It’s taking over everything. It’s even taken over the fashion industry; it’s taken over every aesthetic aspect of how people are presenting themselves. My worry is that people are depicting themselves in a certain way, but they’re not really understanding of their own sexuality or of other people’s. So it just [becomes] an image, and by not having these conversations about sex, [we’re] just perpetuating an aesthetic. women closeup eyes piercings digital desire magazine victoria valmer faces 1680x1050 People Eyes HD Art In his accounting of the cross, Luke tells us in Luke 23:48 that the crucifixion was a physical spectacle before the crowds to see. It reminds me of the lyrics of Joseph Hart’s hymn, “His Passion”: By divine design, Christians are pro-spectacle. We give our entire lives to this greatest Spectacle. But it is a spectacle for the ear, and that’s where the greatest tension arises in our age of competing spectacles.A drift away from what we have heard with our ears — in the form of a nautical metaphor. It tells us the importance of holding a ship’s course toward a fixed point, to avoid being pulled off course and drifting away.
The porn industry wants your lust. YouTubers will give you new spectacles in exchange for your views and your likes. Netflix flat-out wants our most precious commodity: our time — deliberately and intentionally trying to intrude on our sleep patterns to extract even more time from us. Politicians want our votes. The gaming industry wants our money. And so, from each of them comes a vast array of eye-grabbing spectacles, each demanding something from us. Isabella: Taking someone’s image, copying someone, or selling their images, is inescapable in this culture. There are [right] ways to do it and there are immoral ways to do it. Even right now, there are big celebrities going on OnlyFans… Reggaeton is sexual dancing music; it’s all about liberating yourself and moving your body. By discovering my sexuality [through music], I’m doing my past self a favor. I’m trying to be the star I was envisioning, or the girl I needed, when I was young.
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The porn legend and reggaeton pop princess on sexuality, art in the attention economy, and making their Catholic guilt work for them These days, the line between civilian and sex worker is not as sharply drawn as it was ten or fifteen years ago. Much of that is thanks to Grey, whose success across a variety of creative mediums helped normalize the idea that pornstars are people with talents, abilities, and interests outside of having sex on camera. First came aTelecine, Grey’s experimental noise collaboration, followed by a buzzy transition into mainstream acting—landing the lead role in Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 indie drama, The Girlfriend Experience. She’s also published a photobook, a series of novels, and toured as an international DJ. Recently, Grey’s taken to Twitch, where she streams gameplays and cooking segments to an audience of over 670,000.
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