Recreate Your World

This book by Ron and Charity Luce is designed to turn teenagers who are over-obsessed with pop culture into discerning social critics who reduce their unthinking consumption of goods, services, entertainment and whatnot, and start proactively constructively coming up with ways of being and defining themselves as people in God's good world. Now, the actual value judgments underpinning a lot of the argument in this book in my opinion seem to come from a place of dogmatic adherence to traditional norms and ideals - i.e. it is very puritanical, and insofar as it challenges status quo culture it only challenges it in superficial ways and nowhere in the book does it encourage teenagers to critically or proactively think about applying the same radical scrutiny of the values embedded in pop culture to political society at large - but hey, most book-writing American Christian pastors all run megachurches that depend for religio-economic survival on a deformed version of the gospel which neuters its critique of worldly wealth and power, because, duh doy, monotheistic organised religion and liberal-nationalist economics proved to be an incredibly good hegemonic combo - basically it's unreasonable of me to expect this book to be anything less than a philosophically shallow and spiritually half-hearted nudge in the general right direction of becoming skeptical of worldly culture. Anyway, I reread it* because it's really short and, despite my many complaints about it, I'm now pretty sure it's close to exactly the sort of book my fifteen-year-old brother needs to read to puncture his adolescent faith in the Popular - all the niggles and nuances we can try to work out when he doesn't laugh at me for trying to talk about non-fictional non-pop-culturey stuff. Make of this post what you will. I don't really recommend this book, but I am literally bequeathing it to my sibling in the hope it will help him. It may serve a purpose, and its many inadequacies are probably forgivable in that it's meant to be read by teenagers who are unlikely to retain most of it for long anyway.

* Having read it once before as a fifteen-year-old and retained literally Nothing from it, apart from remembering the phrase 'culture zombie' which still sometimes vaguely pops up in the unreliable-haunting-guilt part of my conscience when I'm thinking/talking/doing summat about the kind of pop culture that Ron Luce dislikes.**

** They represent an ilk (sadly not, I fear, a minority) of the contemporary Western post-Christendom church who would genuinely be less offended by a story with persistent and damagingly insidious sexist undertones than by one which uses the word 'fuck'.