Cultural Rhetoric

You know that things are going down in church when your pastor rates a sermon as PG-13. My church has been studying the Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians. The series is entitled A Beautiful Mess because the Corinthian church was sinful, but the people loved Jesus. This past Sunday, on December 3, my pastor, Paul Anderson, travelled through 1 Corinthians 5. In the beginning of the sermon, he drew a graph that demonstrated the proportional relationship between Confrontation and Commitment; meaning that, as a part of the church, it is the Christian’s duty to commit to love their brother or sister in Christ, and to confront them of their sin--sexual immorality. Unholy sex was everywhere in the Corinthian church. The problem is, it was considered normal. My pastor used the graph to explain how Paul wanted the Corinthians to act, as well as how we should act. If the graphical relationship was too close to Confrontation, you could be considered a jerk. If the relationship was too clos...

If anyone were to ask me who my favorite celebrity or musical artist was, I would automatically reply with Lindsey Stirling. Lindsey Stirling is a hip hop, dancing violinist who started her professional career in 2012. This past May, Stirling released her YouTube Red documentary, Brave Enough . It is so called because that is the title of her most recent album. I saw the trailer as soon as it came out, when Stirling first mentioned the movie. The ad itself showed clips from her different concerts, featured songs from the Brave Enough album, and also incorporated scenes from some of her videos. She explains how the movie takes place in what seemed to so far be the hardest year of her life--the year her best friend had passed away due to cancer. Through this movie, she hopes to help others learn how to be brave, to be able to feel emotions that may be hard to feel. She says how she had fallen multiple times in the past, and “Every time you get up a little bit stronger.” I would s...