The Vanishing Word: The Veneration of Visual Imagery in the Postmodern World

by Arthur W. Hunt III

Overview

Is image everything? For many people in our culture, image and images are everything. Americans spend hours watching television but rarely finish a good book. Words are quickly losing their appeal. Arthur Hunt sees this trend as a direct assault on Christianity. He warns that by exalting imagery we risk becoming mindless pagans. Our thirst for images has dulled our minds so that we lack the biblical and mental defenses we need to resist pagan influences. What about paganism? Hunt contends that it never died in modern Western culture; image-based media just brought it to the surface again. Sex, violence, and celebrity worship abound in our culture, driving a mass media frenzy reminiscent of pagan idolatry. This book is a clear warning that the church is being cut off from its word-based heritage, and that we are open to abuse by those who exploit the image but neglect the Word. Thoughtful readers will find this a challenging call to be critical about the images bombarding our sense and to affirm that "the Word is everything."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781725233386
Publisher:	Wipf & Stock Publishers
Publication date:	09/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	36 MB
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About the Author

Arthur W. Hunt III is associate professor of communications at The University of Tennessee at Martin. His writings have been featured in Touchstone, Modern Age, The Christian Research Journal, and Explorations in Media Ecology: The Journal of the Media Ecology Association. He is the author of Surviving Technopolis: Essays on Finding Balance in Our New Manmade Environments (Pickwick Publishers) and serves on the editorial board of Second Nature, an online journal for critical thinking about technology and new media in light of the Christian tradition.