Snippet: "It's absolutely insane"

This snippet is from John Stonestreet in the weekly “Culture Friday” segment on The World and Everything In It podcast (September 17):

“It's absolutely insane. To give teenagers, especially young teenagers, unaccountable access to the internet, per se, and that's just because of the things that are predatory, really looking for them. But when you actually then add [how social media] actually reshapes our hearts, souls and minds, and then we give that to young girls in particular, or young men for that matter. It literally makes no sense. Future generations will look back at us with all of this that we know and basically call us child abusers.”

His “young girls in particular” comment relates to what he was taking about right before this.

And he doesn’t offer any easy answers for parents. The key terms are “young teenagers” and “unaccountable access” and “predatory.”

And the context of this discussion is the interviewer’s question regarding a new Wall Street Journal investigation of Facebook and Instagram and their “internal documents revealing the social media platforms were keenly aware of the mental health challenges their products made worse. One internal communication admitted that an Instagram study found that the app made ‘...body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.’'“ But they have surpressed this information and stated the opposite publicly.

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Snippet: Cold, Self-righteous Prigs

snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

I have a couple of snippets from one podcast episode. Gary Yagel quotes C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:

“If anyone thinks that (biblically informed) Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, they are quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual. The pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing, and patronizing, and spoil sport, and backbiting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me…they are the animal self and the diabolical self; and the diabolical self is the worst of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig, who goes regularly to church, may be nearer to hell than a prostitute. But of course, it is better to be neither.”

Tim Keller has said that you can tell when he didn’t have a lot of time to prepare a talk or sermon because he’ll quote Lewis a lot, having read his books many times. You can see how this quote has influenced Keller, if you follow Keller closely.

This was in the first episode I’ve heard of this podcast, and I’m impressed, although I think most episodes are so packed someone would have to listen to them several times for some of the ideas to stick. The podcast is called “Mission Focused Men for Christ” and it’s their latest episode which focuses on helping our kids understand that worldview matters.

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