by | Aug 17, 2023 | Uncategorized
Popular new programs focus on the power of storytelling and the potential for evangelism.
Across the years—and gaming systems—Christians have engaged the realm of video games. They’ve played, discussed, and developed games, but they haven’t always had formal training in the theology of video games.
Now, more than a dozen Christian colleges offer video game majors, minors, and concentrations, giving students called to game design the chance to learn in settings that integrate their faith.
Messiah University students in the mobile application and game design concentration are “bringing a Christian perspective to bear on the digital world they will be helping to create.” Abilene Christian University students learn from Christian instructors in the field of digital entertainment technology and are challenged to “change the game” as they dream and create.
At Oklahoma Christian University, class enrollment in the gaming and animation program has tripled over the past seven years. Biola University’s degree in game design and interactive media began as a concentration in its cinema program in 2019 but quickly became its own major the following year.
The program equips students to see the growing medium as a mission field and a platform for compelling storytelling.
“Anywhere where there’s a powerful means of communication, it makes sense for Christians to be in that space,” said Michael Steffen, who heads the Biola program and owns Lantern Tower Games.
While Biola teaches video game majors about programming, the primary focus is gameplay: storyline, characters, world-building, and the themes and messages embedded within. A video game allows its audience to interact with the work and be impacted by it in an experiential way, rather than exclusively through …
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by | Aug 17, 2023 | Uncategorized
Photography played a key role in 19th- and 20th-century Christian outreach and missions.
In the early years of the 20th century, Jacob August Riis was spotlighting the squalid New York City neighborhoods where hundreds of thousands were packed into dank and dangerous tenements. Half a world away, Alice Seeley Harris was working to expose the brutal regime terrorizing millions in the Congo Free State. In their quests to capture attention and inspire action, Riis and Harris each discovered a secret weapon: photographs.
A reporter who immigrated to the US from Denmark when he was 21, Riis turned to new techniques of flash photography to illuminate the conditions of impoverished New Yorkers crammed into shoddy, windowless apartment buildings. Meanwhile, Harris and her husband John, both British Baptist missionaries in the Congo, smuggled out photos documenting the shocking atrocities being committed under the colonial rule of King Leopold II of Belgium.
Using the still-novel craft of photography, both Riis and Harris spurred national and international efforts that helped change the lives of millions of people. More than a century later, their efforts are honored in books, plays, and exhibitions and also remembered on World Photography Day—August 19—which pays tribute to the history of the craft and its power to influence people.
Neither Harris nor Riis would have described themselves as photographers. Riis was a writer and lecturer who implored the public to rise up and fight the misery he witnessed in the slums of New York City. He published articles describing how people lived like “vermin” and “inmates” in decrepit buildings that lacked ventilation and basic plumbing, but his message took on new power when he realized how flash photography could shed light on those issues. Riis …
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by | Aug 17, 2023 | Uncategorized
“Rich Men North of Richmond” is disdainful towards people on welfare. Christians shouldn’t be.
As a native of Appalachia, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the plight of blue-collar Americans. Mine is a region shaped by the struggle for fair pay and safe working conditions. To this day, “coal country” for many is synonymous with hard living and generational poverty.
So when I heard about Oliver Anthony’s viral hit, “Rich Men North of Richmond” (a reference to powerful elites in Washington, DC), I was excited for a song in the tradition of Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie—music that names the inherent dignity of the poor, lodges a protest against establishment excess, and echoes Old Testament calls for justice, like God’s condemnation in Jeremiah 5:28 of those who “have grown fat and sleek” yet “do not promote the case of the fatherless” or “defend the just cause of the poor.”
Then I heard these lyrics:
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
Immediately, I was transported back in time.
I’m a 30-year-old mother of three again, standing in the checkout line of our local grocery store. Rhonda, the organist from the church that my husband pastors, has cued up directly behind me. She says hello, and I nod back.
Normally, I would ask about her grandbabies or garden, but instead, I mumble an excuse about having forgotten bread and navigate my cart out of line toward the aisles stocked with food. But I haven’t forgotten anything. It’s a charade, a charade brought about by the shame I feel because my family is on …
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by | Aug 17, 2023 | Uncategorized
An Australian court found Brian Houston may have had a reasonable excuse not to call police about his father’s crimes.
Hillsong founder Brian Houston has been found not guilty of concealing his father’s sexual abuse of a young boy.
An Australian court ruled Thursday that while Houston did not report his father’s crimes to the police when he learned about them in the 1990s, the evidence does not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did not have a reasonable excuse.
“I am not my father,” Houston said, leaving the courthouse in Sydney. “I did not commit this offense, and I feel a sense of relief that at least the truth has come out.”
Houston and his father’s abuse victim, Brett Sengstock, sat yards apart in a tiny courtroom in Sydney’s Downing Centre as magistrate Gareth Christofi delivered his judgment. It took almost two hours to read, as Christofi reviewed the facts and legal arguments.
In the crowded room, Houston’s supporters appeared confident the judgment would be in his favor, but they visibly relaxed as Christofi spoke.
“I am not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that in not reporting to police, the accused did not take the victim Brett Sengstock’s wishes into account,” Christofi said. “Therefore, I am not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused did not have a reasonable excuse.”
Houston’s father, Frank, sexually abused Sengstock in the 1970s, starting when Sengstock was just seven years old. The elder Houston, who died in 2004, was a prominent and respected Assemblies of God pastor who was jokingly called “the bishop.” Sengstock told 60 Minutes Australia that the abuse continued for five years and destroyed his childhood.
Houston learned about the abuse in the late 1990s and, as the Assemblies of God’s national president, …
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by | Aug 16, 2023 | Uncategorized
As the US pursues a closer relationship with India, activists are concerned some are overlooking the persecution of religious minorities in the world’s largest country.
For nine days, Pieter Friedrich starved himself to get his congressman’s attention.
Drawing from his own Christian tradition of prayer and fasting and the Indian political tactic of satyagraha, the activist and journalist fasted from July 27 until August 5, aiming to convince US Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, to speak on the House floor about violence against Christians.
“He has not just a political responsibility, but a human responsibility to raise these issues,” said Friedrich, after he had abandoned his strike at the request of two Indian organizations. “I believe the only way he continues to refuse doing so is because he’s continuing to straddle the fence.”
The Christians whose plight Friedrich was demanding Khanna take responsibility for, however, were not Californians, but Indians living more than 7,000 miles away in Manipur. The fence he was accusing an American congressman of straddling was US policy toward Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and his troubling history of Hindu nationalism.
From President Joe Biden to Indian American congressmembers like Khanna, American politicians are under increasing pressure to account for their courtship of Modi, the leader of a strategically important ally and the world’s largest democracy, while ignoring the Indian regime’s oppression of religious minorities.
Modi’s recent visit to Washington—where he met with President Biden, attended a state dinner, and addressed Congress—fully rehabilitated a figure who was refused a visa by the US State Department in 2015. At the time, Modi, then chief minister of the state of Gujarat, held a precarious position on the international stage after more than 900 of his constituents, …
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