What's up with this...?

What's up in popular culture when it comes to discerning the presence of the Lord?  Clearly there is a yearning for an encounter with life beyond life - however you want to make sense of that - in that three of the top 10 TV shows in 2010 have to do with the supernatural and vampires? (True Blood, Vampire Diaries and Supernatural.)  And let's not forget the 2011 winner: The Walking Dead?  The supernatural is an upside and sometimes immature impulse to know about the spiritual - especially when the traditional world of religion is so vapid and corrupt.

+ And what about "Lost?"  It is a great TV adventure in which linear time as we know it disappears, everyone is sorting out a distant or broken past relationship with a loved one that causes confusion while everyone also encounters a love greater than our wounds that makes sense of life even without answering all our questions.  I see the theme of "grace trumps karma" all over this bad boy.

+ There are also five crime shows that are making the critics' list:  NCIS, Bones, Breaking Bad along with Luther and Law and Order: UK.  Each in their own way reinforces our sense that life, while not fair, is governed by a drive towards justice.  And even when that justice is dispensed by very broken souls - and these are all wounded healers - there is a sense that the force of good is just holding back the tides of chaos.  And what about "Justified?" (my personal favorite...) A 21st century Dirty Harry doing battle with both chaos and history with a sense of humor and a ton of humility.

We're going to start "Treme" tonight - perhaps the cream of the recent crop - that speaks a whole lot about life in post September 11th America, yes?  "Moral habits that originated in religious communities," writes Kelton Cobb, "now travel down two different roads: one still within religion and one in its secular diaspora of cultural spirituality."  He continues:

With respect to doing a theological analysis of culture, it is important to remember that the moral habits that now travel in secular diaspora in the West were originally conceived as responses to theological convictions about the nature of God, the human condition, covenant, grace and salvation.  That raises the possibility that if one digs around in our culture's moral habits - which are found in the non-profit institutions it supports, the mythic stories it tells itself, its founding documents and the exemplary persons it promotes as worthy to emulate... - a theological layer might be uncovered.  (Cobb, Theology and Popular Culture, p. 129)

I see a nation that is deeply alienated from the Christian truths of our collective past but profoundly hungry for a redeeming spiritual experience, too.  We are self-absorbed and addicted, but like "Mad Men" we bored with ourselves and clear that "things" are not the answer at the same time. I sense a people literally "lost" who sense that God's grace is available but are clueless about where to turn for help. To say nothing of a nation yearing for justice in the economic and moral chaos who also know that  it is fleeting. 

Douglas John Hall has observed that now that the old church has been disestablished by secular culture, maybe the true Jesus can be shared with a people groping in the darkness?