For most Americans, what we call “popular culture” provides the horizon, the vocabulary, the texture and rhythm of cultural experience. Trying to establish the presence of the permanent things around which classical schooling is ordered often creates a clash of sensibilities more severe than any conflict in content. Ken Myers will offer a framework for understanding this dissonance and offer some suggestions about how to confront the hegemony of fun and fashion.
Ken Myers
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, a bimonthly audio magazine that examines issues in contemporary culture from a framework shaped by Christian conviction. He was formerly the editor of This World: A Journal of Religion and Public Life, a quarterly journal whose editor-in-chief was Richard John Neuhaus. Prior to his tenure at This World, he was executive editor of Eternity magazine. For eight years, he was a producer and editor for National Public Radio, working for much of that time as arts and humanities editor for the two news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Mr. Myers serves as an advisory editor for Christianity Today, and his published writings include All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Crossway Books: 1989), and (as editor) Aspiring to Freedom: Commentaries on John Paul II’s Encyclical “The Social Concerns of the Church” (William B. Eerdmans: 1988). He has also written for numerous periodicals. He has served on the Arts on Radio and Television Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, and he lectures frequently at colleges, universities, and churches around the country. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland, where he studied film theory and criticism, and of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He and his wife Kate have a large garden, a cat, a dog, two children, and they live in the country, north of Charlottesville, Virginia.