Last summer, when my wife, Monica, and I took a long-overdue vacation together, I volunteered to leave behind my laptop computer and to avoid all television. On the first morning of our vacation in Seattle, while worshiping in a suburban church, we heard of Princess Diana's violent death.

At the Seattle-Tacoma airport the following Saturday, waiting for a flight home, I saw reporter Bernard Shaw offering brief closing thoughts as Cable News Network wrapped up its live coverage of the funeral for Princess Diana. I saw CNN's obligatory "video logo" and somber theme music about her death—the sort of thing cnn usually reserves for wars, presidential elections, or political scandals. I had not missed TV during the week, and I had not pleaded with Monica to turn on the set in any of the places we stayed.

Suddenly, though, I felt a bit cheated—cheated out of the pathos of watching TV for the four hours between the crash and Diana's death; cheated out of hearing her brother excoriate the tabloid press; cheated even of hearing Elton John sing his maudlin anthem "Candle in the Wind," reworded in honor of the fallen princess. Covering the sudden loss of Princess Diana was, quite simply, one of the things TV does best: an epic, live drama that unites the global village.

Several such global village experiences have emerged in the lifespan of TV. In my own lifetime, I would cite these: the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedy brothers; the mind-numbing mass suicides in Jonestown; the Iranian hostage crisis; the attempted assassination of President Reagan; the one-and-only Super Bowl broadcast of Macintosh's "1984" commercial; the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the fall of Jim Bakker's PTL empire; the fall of Jimmy Swaggart's empire; the hope and terror of Tiananmen Square; the Gulf War; the agonizing Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings; the FBI siege in Waco; the bombing in Oklahoma City; and the still-unfolding investigation of President Clinton.

One network news program, Nightline, began as a nightly update on the hostages held in Iran. Ever since, Nightline has done its best work while offering analysis of unfolding crises. Among faithful Nightline fans, who can forget Ted Koppel's courteous but indignant questioning of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker during the PTL meltdown, or his poignant interview with Harry Wu as Hong Kong faced its assimilation into the People's Republic of China?

For many of us, these crises have felt more real, more communal, and more personal precisely because we have seen them on TV. Television has enabled us to see news stories unfold before our eyes.

I vividly remember first hearing about the Challenger exploding as I met a friend for morning coffee—but my empathy deepened as I watched the haunting infinite video loop that showed Challenger exploding and then the shock on the faces of family members gathered on the beach for the launch.

Of course, these images do not necessarily evoke empathy. British author Steve Turner portrays the dark side, the voyeurism of such images, in his poem "Exclusive Pictures":

Give us good pictures
of the human torch
which show the skin
burnt like chicken,
bursting like grapes.

It will teach us
to avoid flames.

Give us good film
of the lady on the ledge
as she leaps open mouthed
and hits the streets
like a suicide.

It will teach us
to use stairways . …

Give us five page spreads
of the airliner that fell
like a pigeon to the ground.
And make sure you get there
before the victims are pulled out.

It will teach engines to function.

Watching the evening news can lead a person to intercessory prayer, to a troublesome self-satisfaction at escaping some awful suffering, or to no feelings at all. What TV news offers, better than any other medium so far, is an immediate glimpse into the human drama—whether in Oklahoma City or Baghdad.

To be sure, TV offers that glimpse through subjective filters, and some of those filters are appallingly antisupernatural. One need only watch network coverage of a pro-life rally, or any story involving theological nuances, to realize the limitations of reporters. Those limitations are not exclusive to television, however—they also affect the New York Times, the New Yorker, newsweeklies, talk radio, and novels. Prejudice and intellectual sloth have been part of our dna since the Fall. They are not mutations caused by staring into the glare of klieg lights.

Full disclosure: I grew up watching television, so I loved TV long before I learned to love books. But intellectuals needn't stop reading at this point. I now love books even more than TV, and I'm still trying to find an acceptable penance for my wayward years. More than once I have given up TV for Lent, which forces me to confront TV's idolatrous potential in my life. On occasion I have considered giving up television altogether—but then along comes another global village saga, a compelling drama (Homicide: Life on the Streets), or even a comedy series (Frasier, King of the Hill) that not only reflects American culture but shapes it. I have sometimes written television criticism, which gave me an excuse for watching: "It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it."

Quite apart from writing occasional criticism, though, I keep watching because TV matters too much to our culture for me—or any Christian who really cares about redeeming culture—to ignore it. The most common temptation is to watch entirely too much television. An equal and opposite temptation is to adopt a neo-Manichaean view of TV, wherein television is an insidious and nearly omnipotent Dark Force engaged in a cosmic struggle with the defenders of decency, learning, and tradition. To be sure, too much TV rots the brain. Ignoring TV doesn't squander the brain so much as impose legalistic boundaries on the brain's capacities: Thou shalt not acknowledge that TV can engage the mind.

This neo-Manichaean view is expressed in its most primitive form by the bumper sticker that urges people: "Kill Your TV." (Seeing this phrase just below a bumper sticker for the rock band known as Phish is not what one normally calls a persuasive argument.) A more sophisticated form of the neo-Manichaean argument appears in Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, first published in 1978 and still in print.

One good friend, a priest, told me he gave up TV long ago, after reading Mander's book and finding a compelling argument that, within five minutes, watching TV induces a brain state known as alpha, usually achieved through meditation or hypnosis. "That means all those images are entering our brains without being filtered for reality—the reason it's such a great advertising medium," my friend wrote. "What's scary about that is that the alpha state does not allow active critical thinking, as does reading or listening to radio. Cinema does not do the same, as we make eye movements when watching movies. The TV/alpha connection is connected with making fewer, smaller eye movements."

My friend decided he could live without TV when he realized that "Madison Avenue uses it to sell me things I do not need." My friend has read far more in brain theory than I ever have, and he can usually argue me into the fetal position within an hour, but I believe he underestimates TV's importance as the lingua franca of the global village.

Perhaps he is none the poorer for it. Certainly few of us will go to our deathbeds wishing we had watched more television. Nevertheless, some of us may wish we had spent more time thinking critically about the TV we did watch, whether as a guilty pleasure or as a genuine effort at understanding the surrounding culture. A few books published in recent years demonstrate that people can indeed think and watch television at the same time—and even live to write about the experience, though their books are not equally satisfactory.

In Glued to the Set: The 60 Television Shows and Events That Made Us Who We Are Today, Stephen D. Stark achieves some of the finest writing about TV in years. "In many ways over the past half-century, the history of television has become the history of America, and not just because we all now experience everything from moon landings to wars via the tube," Stark writes. "Television's ubiquity makes it a pop-culture version of the air we breathe. It is hardly news that this medium's programming has been influential—superseding school, and sometimes even the family, as the major influence on our social and moral development. It is fair to say that there have been two eras in America: Before Television (BT) and After Television (AT)."

The beauty of Stark's work is his focus on 60 shows as illustrating broader cultural movements. In "The Beverly Hillbillies and the Rise of Populist Television," he writes that CBS's wildly popular comedy "was the first telltale sign on television that the cultural unity of the fifties was splintering: It's not a stretch to say that the ongoing values debate, and even the rise of the Christian Coalition, began here."

His essay "Sesame Street: The Last Remnant of the Counterculture" is one of the few works by a generally liberal critic to poke fun at the show's liberal ethos: "To answer the question in the theme song, turn left at Haight-Ashbury and you're sure to get to Sesame Street." Stark occasionally overstates his case—it's doubtful that his Before Television and After Television milestones will take hold outside of some universities' pop-culture departments. But he doesn't take himself too seriously and is a refreshing personality: a man who can move in academia (he has lectured at Harvard Law School) but who also writes accessible criticism.

Rob Owen's Gen X TV: The Brady Bunch to Melrose Place is aptly named. Even the format of Owen's book is designed to meet what publishers think all Gen X readers demand. Hardly a page goes by without a large photo, a snappy subtitle, or a boxed sidebar of "Show Stats" or factoids (such as how to subscribe to the magazine Teenage Gang Debs, which concentrates its critical attention on, yes, The Brady Bunch). This fanzine of a book is published by Syracuse University Press, while Stark's weightier essays are published by the Free Press. What is wrong with this picture?

At the other end of the spectrum from Rob Owen is culture critic John Leonard, onetime editor of the New York Times Book Review and currently the essayist on CBS Sunday Morning, who sounds perpetually out of breath because he's so busy piling on the cross references, ersatz ironies, and laundry lists of examples. From Leonard's book Smoke and Mirrors: Violence, Television, and Other American Cultures, consider this string of five sentences, leading to a 124-word haymaker:

And we were left behind, convalescent: to be mediated by lesser Buddhists like Oprah, Geraldo, Tempest, Montel, Maury, Rolanda, Sally, Jenny, Ricki, Kathie and Regis and Alana and George. To be hortatoried by beltway unabombers on the chat channels. To be sally struthered by "infomercials" on starvation in Africa and real-estate in Florida and the Greatest Hits of Johnny Cash. To be historectomied by Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. To be devolved, on a Weather Channel where we are asked to fret about Canadian cold fronts and Kansas cyclones and tropical Caribbean storms and mudslides on Mount Ararat as if we could conceivably care enough to do anything about it; and on PBS or Discovery where we are told just how other insects and penguins are, and spoon-billed bee-eaters and adhesive-padded geckos, and mad scientists and Englishmen; and on MTV, where they are snarling at us—never mind Chubby Checker: Metallica (with nightmares about trucks and snakes) and Nine-Inch Nails (upset about animal experimentation) and Pearl Jam (murdering a child) do not mean us well—as if music video were the return of the repressed, like Pat Robertson and gay porn.

Pat Robertson and gay porn? This is Leonard at his most hectoring and self-indulgent. Such run-on sentences and feverish arguments clog too many pages in Smoke and Mirrors. Mr. Leonard should try the decaf, place his periods more often, and rest in the knowledge that anyone who is anyone now realizes just how well-read he is. Watching Leonard occasionally take TV-bashers to task is the one treat of an otherwise tedious book.

In Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment, Newton Minow and Craig Lamay argue forcefully for greater governmental involvement in regulating how TV exploits children. To their credit, Minow and Lamay do not expect a nanny state to take the place of parents who fail to supervise what their children watch. Abandoned in the Wasteland is especially valuable because it collects Minow's famous "vast wasteland" speech to the National Association of Broadcasters (May 9, 1961) and another speech Minow delivered at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, 30 years later to the day. Abandoned in the Wasteland is an important warning about abandoning children's minds to a babysitter known (in the language of Minow and Lamay) as SuperTube.

Minow and Lamay quote Proverbs 22:6, which promises that a child, trained in the right way to live, will not depart from it in later years. That holds true in Minow's life: his grown daughter, Nell, edits a family-friendly movie review Web site known as "Moviemom" (http://pages.prodigy.com/moviemom/moviemom.html). Father and daughter engaged in a thoughtful Slate magazine dialogue in early 1997 about the relative value of ratings for TV shows.

In Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television, Joel Brinkley documents the race between the American TV industry and Japanese engineers to create the standard for high-definition television. Mander, in Four Arguments, complains that TV must concentrate on the extreme because the picture on most televisions is so murky. HDTV will change all that, although it is difficult to imagine Mander heaving a sigh of relief at that news. HDTV will enable ever-wider menus of channels and far more vivid visuals. The day of the 24-hour Grandfather Clock Channel may finally arrive.

Even for TV addicts there's a dark side to this bright technological future. Within the next decade, all TV owners must either trade up to HDTV sets or buy converters. The day will come when current TV sets will be rendered useless, unless they're equipped to receive HDTV signals. Congress had better get busy with an Equal Access to HDTV Justice bill while there's still time.

Sometimes I find it difficult to know who is more tiresome: technological utopians like Bill Gates and some of the characters in Brinkley's book, or the neo-Manichaeans who believe that TV or the Internet have opened Pandora's box.

I should correct myself. I know that, six days out of seven, the neo-Manichaeans are far more tiresome than the utopians. If the apostle Paul walked among us today, he would not likely join the garish spectacles of the Trinity Broadcasting Network. He would, however, no more likely join those Christians who reject TV entirely, whether from intellectual snobbery or cultural isolationism. If I cannot imagine the apostle Paul as a pugnacious guest on Nightline, or citing a character's anguished struggles with Roman Catholicism on Homicide, then my apostle Paul—and my sense of the Christian's cultural mandate—is too small.

Douglas L. LeBlanc edits United Voice, the national newspaper of Episcopalians United, when he isn't watching television.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.