Francis Schaeffer

Schaeffer’s four key criteria for approaching art and media

In his ground-breaking 1973 essay Art & the Bible, influential evangelical author Francis Schaeffer (1913–1984) proposed four key criteria for enjoying and evaluating art and media messages.

This is still a highly relevant and significant resource for practicing appropriate media awareness and media critique – even in today’s postmodern media world.

© Lausanne Movement. Used under a CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 licence.

The threefold media challenge from Cape Town

Part Two of The Cape Town Commitment (CTC) summarizes the themes of Cape Town 2010, the Third Lausanne Congress. The first section of Part Two – ‘Bearing witness to the truth of Christ in a pluralistic, globalized world’ – includes a significant sub-section on the threefold media challenge and identifies major needs in Media Awareness, Media Presence and Media Ministries.

Breaking news by Luc De Leeuw. Used under a CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 licence.

12 Questions to Ask When Watching the News

News media play a significant role in the everyday lives for most of us, and we need to actively engage with it. If we don’t, we fail to appreciate the demanding and significant work of the journalists. Nor do we become critically aware of the explicit angles and the underlying perspectives in the news. The following set of critical questions will help us reflect carefully when watching, reading or listening to the news, whether global, regional, national or local. If you apply such questions as these consistently, engaging the news become increasingly meaningful!