Plugged In: Connecting Your Faith with Everything You Watch, Read, and Play
Whether it's TV boxsets, Instagram stories or historical novels, we all consume culture. So it’s important that we are neither bewitched by it—buying into everything it tells us—or bewildered by it—lashing out in judgement or retreating into a Christian bubble.
Dan Strange encourages Christians to engage with everything they watch, read and play in a positive and discerning way. He also teaches Christians how to think and speak about culture in a way that plugs in to a bigger and better reality—the story of King Jesus, and his cosmic plan for the world.
It’s possible to watch TV and read novels and play video games in a way that actually feeds our faith, rather than withers it. It’s even possible for you—yes, you—to be that person who starts off talking to a mate about last night’s football and ends up talking about Jesus.
So be equipped to engage with culture in a way that helps your relationship with Christ and points others to him.
This book is a deceptively easy read: deceptive in that it's extremely engaging and hard to put down, and only on reflection does one realize how much theological heavy lifting has happened in the background to make the book possible. “Subversive fulfilment” is the big idea here, a strategy meant to keep us from simply compromising with the culture on the one hand or only condemning everything as bad on the other: the gospel perfectly fulfils the desires our culture expresses for meaning, identity, significant work, fulfilment as created beings—but always subversively, by exposing and undermining the idols which broken images constantly set up for themselves. Strange makes cultural analysis and evangelism very practical by giving a four-step process based on Acts 17: enter (listening to the story being told), explore (look for genuine reflections of God’s grace and distortions of it in idolatry), expose (try to expose the hollow promises of idolatry), evangelize (talk about the good news of a God who can really deliver what the idol only promises). The book is both really enjoyable and stretching; you won't be sorry you read it. (Erin Ortlund)