So what’s this IFC business? You’ll hear the acronym a lot this year. It stands for the integration of faith and culture, it’s a cabinet im on, and we plan concerts and movies and speakers and artists and authors for the campus. Here’s part of a rough draft of an article that will be published and distributed over campus soon:

“…Broadly, we observed two responses to pop culture by the students at taylor. One response was cavalier: the person watched and listened and consumed whatever he or she wanted, without thought or regard for what any of it meant. The second response was fearful: the person only watched, listened, and consumed Christian media and pop culture, because that media had been designated “safe” by whomever labeled it “Christian”: everything else was off-limits. Both of these are unthinking responses. Unfortunately, they’re also both responses that are more often than not promoted by both “secular” and “religious” American culture, which encourages people to be myopic, passive, and scared. So there needed to be a third way, one which contributes to the development of individuals who are judicious, discerning, and intentional about the choices they make; moreover, this third way had to come from a Christ-centered perspective, in view of his grace, or we were only substituting one sort of legalistic parameters for another.
Here at IFC, we believe music, words, and images contain meaning and that they can tell us something about ourselves, our culture, and our God. We embrace the good and unchanging character of God, and we recognize that He has left indelible marks of Himself all over creation. We see beauty, truth, and goodness wherever it happens to be found – in a sanctuary, at a rock show, in a homeless shelter, on HBO, in salvation testimonies, at a poetry reading – as some of these marks. And we view the grit, pain, and sin of this world as something to be mourned over but not ignored, because we know that in order to understand light, one first must know darkness.”

Enough said, I suppose. That’s IFC.