culture watch
A ‘friendship recession’?
Rebecca Chapman
This February the phenomenon that is the streaming show The Chosen has hit cinemas again, with the first two episodes of Series Four showing us more of Jesus and His disciples.
Director Dallas Jenkins hopes that watching will be a shared experience for many of us, encouraging people to ‘get together during a time that’s very divisive’. This new series is a step up in many ways – more focused, more confident storytelling, and more compelling with its mix of light and dark, sorrow and humour, faith and frustration.
Why is everyone crying after watching Wicked?
What do you do when a friendship goes wrong? Do you call them up and explain how you were hurt - or do you stop replying to messages and remove them from your life entirely?
If you are a part of Gen Z, you might do the latter. Sociologist Jenny van Hooff recently published a paper exploring how our culture views ‘toxic friendships’[1] and found ‘dispiriting’ results. Toxic behaviour was described as anything ‘unsympathetic or simply negative’ and ending a friendship like this was seen as a ‘desirable… even courageous’[2].