Culture Conversations with Joy Handelman-Swift

This semester, our 11th and 12th graders have an incredible opportunity to dialogue with Joy on select Fridays at BCS. The format will include watching a movie or listening to a selection of music then identifying and discussing the implications of the ideas presented. Mrs. Handelman will emphasize the importance of aligning our daily lives with the truth of Christianity, addressing the challenge of navigating a culture filled with conflicting messages.

Joy is a graduate of Brown University with a law degree from the University of Georgia. She currently teaches English at Albany State University and is completing the Colson Fellows program.

A word from Joy:

We should be able to walk out of our churches and homes every day, thinking and confident in the truth of Christianity. There should be no division between our life of faith and our life of work, play, family, and friends. What we face, when we walk out of our churches or out of our homes, is a culture that calls to us that woos us. Sometimes it appears to be beautiful, and sometimes it seems to ring true for the moment. Sometimes our wayward hearts may even long for that message to be true in moments of confusion and pain. The gospel of John tells us that we can even long for darkness. How do we meet the challenge within and the siren song from without? How do we make sense of the onslaught through all the messages that demand our attention from the time we open our eyes and look at our phones to the moment we drift into sleep at night? 

What we hope to accomplish with these movie talks is to look at what our culture is creating, hold it up to the light of the truth of God‘s word, and see what is good and true and what is false and deceptive. As human beings created in God‘s image, we are also creators through our words, our thoughts, and our actions. It is a godly and glorious quest to bring our attention and our thoughts to bear on what our culture is creating. 

Christ’s glorious work of redeeming individuals from sin is the beginning and first fruits of his restoration of all creation. We have the honor and the delight of participating in that restoration now before we see him face-to-face. Speaking into a culture with our creations, listening to what the culture itself is saying, and “talking back” to that culture is a part of that participation. 

It is in this spirit that we will view popular movies with challenging, at times even sinful, points of view, to call out and to clarify what these movies are actually saying. Since we are looking at works that people have given their time and treasure to create we want to do this with love, wisdom, righteous judgment, and hope. 

We long for these discussion sessions to be part of the bigger work of life where we encourage the good, resist the evil, rebuild what is broken, and create what is missing for the Glory of God!