piper on tv

Sometimes, John Piper will say things that leave me scratching my head in bewilderment, and other times I feel like he and I could have been college roommates.

This post on TV would be evidence of the latter.  The whole thing is worth reading (even if I don’t agree with every word), but the section found below could have been titled “Taido on TV.”

But leave sex aside (as if that were possible for fifteen minutes on TV). It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

Not to put words in his mouth, but what I think Piper means is that television glorifies the trivial and in doing so simultaneously diminishes that which is truly significant.

BTW, for two-more-cents on media, here’s what my missionary friend in Florida shared today.

Which reminds me…  I saw the second installment of Transformers last night.  I should have known, but it was extraordinarily stupid.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved seeing some Optimus Prime go nuts on the entire Deceptacon army, but the whole movie could have been forty-five minutes shorter had they cut out the decidedly uninteresting “love” story.  I literally laughed at the climactic moment when the leads exchanged their heartfelt expressions of love.  It was a joke, which would explain why I thought it was funny.  But I certainly knew what I was in for…  a movie that would be high on entertainment and completely devoid of substance.

I realize that I’m both knocking media and extolling its cheap-entertainment value in the same post.  And so, the tension that characterizes so many areas of my life persists.  Like the tension I’m feeling right now that I really should be working on promised posts about how we read the Bible.

How do I live with myself?