Marrying Your Virtual Girlfriend. Or how men checked out of culture.
This morning we discussed on my radio spot (Listen or download here) the recent story in the news of a young Japanese man who married his virtual girlfriend (You can read the article here). Whilst I suspect that the story is a publicity stunt by the public relations wing of Nintendo, I think that it hits on a theme that is becoming more and more prevalent in our culture. That is that young men are simply checking out, or losing themselves in a fantasy worl

Cool new feature
If you look to the top of the right sidebar of my blog you will notice a cool new feature. All you have to do is click the button to subscribe, and whenever a new post goes up on this blog it will be directly emailed into your inbox. How easy is that? If you are nice I will attach a set of steak knives.

Censoring Fairytales and ‘the facts of life’
Recently as I have read some children’s stories to my daughter I have noticed how some fairytales have been cleaned up. That is that death, violence and references to evil have been removed from the original stories. A classic example of this is the story of Little Red Riding Hood, most modern versions of the tale remove references to the wolf eating little red riding hoods grandmother, one of the earliest versions of the story has little red riding hood unwittingly eating her grandmothers remains.   The removal of references to death and evil from traditional fairytales illuminates co

Shortcuts to Happiness
‘The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who in the middle of great wealth are starving spiritually. Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die.’   Martin Seligman in Authentic Happiness

From Marriage to Weddings
Because we live in a post-covenantal culture, contemporary society has had to re-frame the concept of marriage. Therefore our cultures emphasis has shifted from crafting a marriage to the creation of a an outstanding wedding ceremony. In the past the wedding ceremony was a simple affair in which the main focus was a public oath of covenantal fidelity. However as we as a culture have moved away from the covenantal to the contractual, the wedding ceremony has changed it’s function, and has come to reflect other cultural values