A Quote by John Updike
The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.
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Barna is correct when he writes, "After fifteen years of diligent digging into the world around me, I have reached several conclusions about the future of the Christian church in America. The central conclusion is that the American church is dying due to lack of strong spiritual leadership. In this time of unprecedented opportunity and plentiful resources, the church is actually losing influence. The primary reason is the lack of leadership. Nothing is more important than leadership."7
I knew what the sanctified life was not. Not a life filled with more rituals, more scrupulously observed. Not more praying. Not becoming a better person, being more charitable, more concerned with everyone else's pains. Sanctifying had something to do with a sense of constant wonder - feeling gratitude and finding significance everywhere, in every action, relationship and object.
Innumerable lovers of Hindi cinema have lit up the big screen. But on screen, they are just two beautiful bodies. They have no caste nor religion. The love that our filmmakers imagined was little more than make-believe.
The people who get more fame, who get more money, more often than not they are miserable, insecure and on anti-depressants. It's strange that everyone keeps buying into this idea that more success is good, that more fame is good, that more money is good. Yet, we look at the people who have more success, more fame, more money and they're miserable.
Nature hates vacuum. Once a society is depleted of moral values, it creates a vacuum that will be filled by doctrines that hold to such values, even though those values are draconian and oppressive. In fact the more a society is devoid of morality, the more promising prudish and unpermissive doctrines look. Licentious societies create a spiritual vacuum that legalistic religions such as Islam fill.
Theatre is more metaphorical where you have to be louder and larger than life, whereas film is more subtle and more real.
With each film, I get more and more involved and it's more and more time-consuming. Also, I like to break myths and people's preconceived ideas. My characters have always stood for something, have always had an opinion, although they've never really rebelled.
The American influence is not so aggressive anymore. The American big business influence in Latin America is not as strong, so people can vote and they can have a different life than before. They can have more liberal, more interesting, and more democratic governments.
The gospel has done its work in us when we crave God more than we crave everything else in life - more than money, romance, family, health, fame - and when seeing His kingdom advance in the lives of others gives us more joy than anything we could own. When we see Jesus as greater than anything the world can offer, we'll gladly let everything else go to possess Him.
More than anything, there are more images in evil. Evil is based far more on the visual, whereas good has no good images at all.
Although all spiritual teachings originate from the same Source, once they become verbalized and written down they are obviously no more than a collection of words-and a word is nothing more than a signpost.
We stink more of the world than we stink of sack cloth and ashes. A lot of contemporary churches today would feel more at home in a movie house rather than in a house of prayer, more afraid of holy living than of sinning, know more about money than magnifying Christ in our bodies. It is so compromised that holiness and living a sin-free life is heresy to the modern church. The modern church is, quite simply, just the world with a Christian T-shirt on!
Laughter is more sacred than prayer, dancing more spiritual than chanting mantras, loving existence more cosmic than going to a church.
In professional wrestling, I think that they want you to be bigger than life. It's almost like an over-acting type thing - whereas on the big screen, you're 35 feet and they've got a close-up of you to put it on the screen in the movie house. At 35 feet, it's more subtlety than the overboard drama that we do in pro wrestling.
What sets Christian spiritual activity apart from all other religions is that they have knowledge of Christ as their goal; not moral perfection (although you will become more moral), not tranquility (although your life will be remarkably more peaceful). And because of the grace you have in Christ, the disciplines will do nothing to make you more accepted by the Father. You cannot be more accepted than you already are in Christ, since He has already done it all for you!
Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism.
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