Given the prevalence of television in the past, and movies and the internet in the present, in forming our culture, it should be obvious to any culture-watcher that we live in an age when image is everything. "Smoke and shadows" are the new reality. This seems a far cry from what the sixties wanted: authenticity. Christianity, with its word-based theology and piety, though, affirms that substance is what life is really about: what we do in time "echoes in eternity."
This is a major challenge for western Christians: how to live lives of reality and substance, not simply image. And it is even a greater danger for a Christian who finds himself or herself in the public limelight: the cultural pressure to maintain an image must be great indeed. May we pray for them that their lives might also be ones of weight and truth.