One of the passages I found most interesting is at the very end of the book (p 236). This sums up my feelings, as well.
Watching movies at home, on a screen however large and a sound system however noisy, is simply not the same thing as seeing them in a theater. My dad used to say that watching movies on TV was like getting kissed over the telephone. What's missing in seeing a film on television is a central component of what it means to be human - the assembly. Whether it's at a church, at a play, or at the movies, the idea of losing your identity at a gathering of others - known or unknown to you - while sharing a common experience, a journey, an event, is uniquely human, and in my opinion we abandon such practices at our peril. Gatherings are important, and certainly better than going through life with ear buds. Never mind the theology or medium in question, concentrate on the part where you rub shoulders with strangers. Cities are places you walk or ride the subway, places where you look at people, they look at you; you don't pass them on the freeway at seventy miles an hour. At the end of a performance of Beethoven's Third, you and the audience have shared an adventure, at one individual and collective. The experience make you a better person. Don't ask me how or why, but it does. There isn't any movie shown on television that wouldn't be better in a movie theater. Art is fragile - it can be interrupted by crying kids, the telephone, the neighbors, what have you. Gatherings, whether for music, church, plays, films, or ballets, are experiences to which you must make a commitment and in making that commitment, in leaving your home to devote yourself to that communal experience, you reaffirm your humanity.
How awesome is that?! Interesting implications for internet churches, but explains why video venues for churches, conferences, and simulcasts are just as effective as those where the speaker is present physically. Food for thought, for sure.
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