Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’d better get the next post in this ‘series’ written before Jonny beats me to it…
In his book The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann identifies two modes of Old Testament prophets. The first is the message of future hope, shaping the imagination of the people so that they can envisage what God’s future will look like. The other is making sure that they confront the reality of their current situation. In this second mode prophets shatter the rosy views people carry around, the assumption that things aren’t as bad as they seem. They make sure that the true extent of the problems and failings are felt.
So, in as much as the church is called to act as a prophetic community, we also have two roles — to proclaim the wonder and promise of God’s future, God’s new creation; but also to ensure that the view of the present is not artificially rosy. I think the second presents a case for art that shows life as it is, with all of the complications and problems. This sort of art confronts people with the things they are trying to ignore or hide from. It forces them to acknowledge that what is here now is not enough; help is needed; healing is needed.
Of course, the point is not to depress people, but to couple the two modes and allow people to turn from their realisation of the problems to see the help. We cut through false imaginings in order to allow our imagination to be shaped by the true hope.
Tags: art, culture, imagination, lament, music
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July 28th, 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Prompted (obliquely) by recent negative comments about Fair Trade (i.e. the Fair Trade mark and associated organisation) on the Jubilee Centre blog (here and here) and also by recent thoughts on reading culture, I thought it would be interesting to try a hermeneutic of Fair Trade. Perhaps looking at FT as a cultural artefact will shed light the criticisms.
Remember that in the
reading culture blogs, I tried a combination of Kevin Vanhoozer’s culture-as-text approach and
Andy Crouch’s cultural-as-artefacts. We came up with three aspects to consider when thinking about a cultural item: Context, Content and Consequences. So, lets try a discussion based on those. I’ll tend towards Crouch’s questions to give a more precise focus. All this is pretty much off the top of my head, so it could no doubt be done better…
OK, so to start with: Context. Or, as Crouch puts it What does this artefact assume about the world? I guess, we have to say the obvious — that Fair Trade assumes a world where global trade is significant and one where trade is not fair. Since Fair Trade is essentially a brand before anything else, it relies heavily on a culture where branding has a significant place. (In some ways, I guess it is a creative re-use of the cultural artefact that is ‘branding’ for a very different use than its original intention.) In many ways it also assumes a consumerist culture, where we have a high degree of choice in what items we buy.
How about Content? We’ll bring in here What does this artefact assume about the way the world should be? Clearly, one thing it assumes is that a fairer trading system is possible, desirable and that some movement in this direction is possible by direct appeal to the end consumers.
Expanding to a more general content, I guess it communicates a belief that a pure free market is insufficient to produce an equitable system by itself. It also expresses a belief that help the poor areas of the world require more than charity. The point is not to buy an item with added financial donation; it is to take part in a fairer system.
OK, finally, Consequences. Crouch’s questions start with…
What does the artefact make possible? We could say better conditions, prices, etc. for the workers/producers, but that was always possible given appropriate will. So, let’s try other directions. A key aspect is responsibility on the part of the consumer. It allows (or even puts pressure on) consumers to take responsibility for the provenance of the things that they consume even if they are not directly involved in the process. It also promotes, to some extent, the connection between the supplier and consumer: though it may not join them directly, the end user is conscious of the producer. This is in contrast to the case where a brand may follow ethical guidelines, but in a way that is not obvious to the consumer — the ethics are there, but the consumer is not connected; and, in fact, may not be thinking conciously about the issues.
What does FT make more difficult/impossible? The main thing the FT mark makes more difficult is for consumers and manufacturers to disassociate their actions from the actions at the other end of the supply chain. The existence of Fair Trade forces the buyer to think about issues along the chain. On the other hand, it makes it difficult for ethical suppliers who, for whatever reason, don’t want to use the FT brand to emphasise their ethical status without some kind of branding, etc.
What new culture is made in response? I guess that the FT mark (along with others) has led to a culture of consumers asking questions about the source of their purchases. It has also (in the UK, at least) led to specific sections of supermarkets that focus on Fair Trade goods and forced large corporations to introduce products that can be classed as Fair Trade to ensure that they don’t lose market share. Finally, it is led to a range of similar initiatives promoting related schemes.
Based on these rough answers, lets look at the quote the Jubilee Centre
used (from the Institute of Economic Affairs):
‘Whilst it is clear that fair trade might bring some benefits to particular groups, whether it brings significant net benefits to the poor in general is questionable. Moreover, the claim that fair trade transactions are more “just” cannot be substantiated. Customers also might be surprised to learn that the majority of the Fairtrade Foundation’s income is spent on promoting its own brand.’
It seems to me that promoting the brand is in line with the significance of the artefact. The FT mark is not primarily a charitable act, but a culture-forming one. The net benefits cannot be measured purely in the direct effect, but in the way that perceptions and practices (of consumers and suppliers) are altered. There are inevitably downsides and weaknesses, but not, perhaps, to the overwhelming extent that the Jubilee Centre posts implied.
Tags: culture, Culture Making (Crouch), justice
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July 27th, 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I was planning to write this post before reading the recently posted extract from Culture Making. Having looked at that, it’s even clearer that we must not miss this step out.
Both Andy Crouch and Kevin Vanhoozer don’t want us to read culture purely for the sake of reading. The reading has to be a springboard to being cultural agents in our own right.
I’ve quoted this from Vanhoozer before, but it’s worth repeating
The mission of the church is to witness to the truth of the gospel by participating in God’s building project, realizing the well-wrought world redeemed in Christ.
…
The church is to be a glimpse of the new world in the midst of the old, a reminder that the old order is passing away and a standing witness to the new. Accordingly, it is charged with the task of being a permanent revolution to prevailing plausibility structures.
Crouch is even clearer on the need to make culture as well as analyse. A key point for him is that
The only way to change culture is to create more of it.
His contention is that the church tends to try to change culture one of four ways: either by condemning, critiquing, copying (forming a sub-culture) or consuming. None of these work in practice, the only way to change culture is
to create something new, something that will persuade our neighbours to set aside some existing set of cultural goods for our new proposal.
For the sake of this post, I’ll focus specifically on critique/analysis. Crouch points to the example that film reviewers are rarely able to influence the general trend of film production. In fact, they rarely affect the success of an individual film. Consequently,
[w]e may produce very sophisticated analyses of the cultural goods around us. … But the depressing truth is that critique and analysis rarely change culture at all. … The academic fallacy is that once you have understood something — analysed and critiqued it — you have changed it. But academic libraries are full of brilliant analyses of every facet of human culture that have made no difference at all in the world beyond the stacks.
Although both agree on this, it is notable that Vanhoozer’s book gets very close to the problem Crouch notes (as discussed in the last post):
you would think that the solution to disembodiment would be embodiment—the living out in the flesh of the transforming vision. … But the emphasis always somehow stays on perception and vision, on thinking, on analysis.
While holding a clear view of the need for performance, it is not clear from Everyday Theology what comes next. But that is probably unfair, since the book is not focussed in that direction and Vanhoozer does discuss performance elsewhere. On the other hand, embodiment is the focus of Culture Making, so it will be interesting to see how practical Crouch can be…
Tags: books, culture, Culture Making (Crouch), Everyday Theology (Vanhoozer), hermeneutics
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July 19th, 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
IVP have put another extract from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making on their site. I had a very enjoyable and consciousness-expanding lunchtime in Costa reading this. Came away buzzing (not simply due to the fact that they forgot to put milk in my coffee…)
The first stand-out part was the critique of the whole analysing-worldviews trend in Christianity. Not saying that it is wrong in itself, but somehow the step between gaining an comprehensive Christian view of the world and actually embodying that is not as straightforward as we make out. Somehow we get stuck at analysis and never move on to transformation.
Crouch’s argument is that we tend to believe that just understanding more acutely will automatically produce the results. He brings this out in a discussion of the introduction to Middleton and Walsh’s classic ‘
The Transforming Vision‘:
“Why does the Christian world view remain so disembodied?” Wolterstorff asks. His answer is telling—it remains disembodied because it is insufficiently … perceived. Christianity has not yet reformed and remolded our culture because of a lack of “vision.” But this is a strange turn of thought from Wolterstorff’s acute statement of the core problem, namely that Christianity is “disembodied.” You would think that the solution to disembodiment would be embodiment—the living out in the flesh of the transforming vision. And indeed every Christian proponent of worldview thinking gestures enthusiastically in this direction. But the emphasis always somehow stays on perception and vision, on thinking, on analysis.
His conclusion is
The language of worldview tends to imply … that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking “worldviewishly” is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. … [We] will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. … But culture is not changed simply by thinking.
Crouch has really hit a key point here. After many great (and helpful) books on worldviews, it is not clear that we know any better what to do about it all. As we’ve
observed before, there is an increasing move to see that we have to go beyond acquiring knowledge to living out. Here the issue is brought out brilliantly for our cultural interactions. In the end analysing has value, but we need to go further. And unless we begin to understand how to do that we may just end up very perceptive couch potatoes.
Tags: books, culture, Culture Making (Crouch), worldview
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July 18th, 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
OK, if you’ve been around long enough to have read the start of this series of posts, then you probably thought it had finished. But, no… In fact, over the last few days I’ve been meaning to write to get round to writing some more.
While I’m getting my thoughts together, here are two things I found recently on the subject: the first is a talk by artist Makoto Fujimura at the
iTunes store; the second a post by Robin Parry on
The Charismatic Curse of Happiness (please don’t be put off by the title…). Both these note our lack of resources for expressing lament. Fujimura mentions a comment from Calvin Seerveld to Michael Card after 9/11, ‘we don’t have songs to sing now, because we don’t know how to lament’.
Parry says:
We do not know how to think theologically about sorrow, we do not know how to make space for it in communal worship, we lack the doxological vocabulary to bring the whole of our human experiences before God and so instead we simply bury them.
…
Do we lack the faith and courage of Old Testament saints to lament? To refuse to keep any dimension of our human experience from God but to come before him as we are – in our joy and our pain?
Tags: art, lament, music, web sights
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July 16th, 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Look, I’ve been wondering about this for a while: Dan Kimball (emerging-church-type) and Mark Kermode (ace-bbc-film-reviewer), separated at birth? At least their hair, anyway?
Tags: frivolity
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July 13th, 2008
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...