Culture making and community (2)
Posted by Paul | Filed under culture
In my last post I pulled together a few thoughts on making art and community. Widening this out a little, we can bring in similar ideas from the recent books on culture by James Hunter Davison and Andy Crouch.
Borrowing Justin Taylor’s summary of Davison:
Thomas Carlyle’s “great man of history” view — “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”—is mostly wrong.
Rather, “the key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network [=community] and the new institutions that are created out of those networks” (p. 38). The more “dense” (active, interactive) the network, the more influential it could be.
Yes, there have been charismatic, heroic geniuses in history (Luther, Calvin, Wilberforce, etc.). But “charisma and genius and their cultural consequences do not exist outside of networks of similarly oriented people and similarly aligned institutions” (p. 38).
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In history, “at every point of challenge and change, we find a rich source of patronage that provided resources for intellectuals and educators who, in the context of dense networks, imagine, theorize, and propagate an alternative universe.” Along with the elites there are often “artists, poets, musicians, and the like who symbolize, narrate, and popularize this vision.” New institutions give tangible expression by forming and enacting that culture. The result is a “vibrant cultural economy that gives articulation in multiple forms, and critical mass to the ideals and practices and goods of the alternative culture in ways that both defy yet still resonate with the existing social environment”.
In Culture Making, Crouch talks about the 3, the 12 and the 120 of any cultural project: the small group who ‘innovate and create a new cultural good’; and ‘concentric circles’ of people who add the weight that allow it to reach it’s full potential.
Absolutely no one makes culture alone. There may be periods of solitude where we work to shape our contribution to our own cultural sphere and scale. But for our work alone to bear any fruit at all, we will need to join a three. So one of the most important questions for our calling is, Who are your 3? Who are the few people you trust enough to risk creativing something together?
It is such communities, not just their famous representatives, that actually transform culture. Communities are the way God intervenes to offer, within every culture, a different and better horizon. To be Christian is to stake our lives on this belief: the only cultural goods that ultimately matter are the ones that love creates.
Culture making and community (1)
Posted by Paul | Filed under culture
What was emphasised to me most clearly from the Everything conference last weekend was the importance of community & relationship in cultural activity.
The seminar on art by Matt Hatch and David Sorley made the point best – probably because the message and the medium were so well matched.
In the discussion it was clear that the successful place of art in their church came from relationship; that the key was building trust (between the leaders and ‘creatives’ in the church) gradually over a number of projects. On top of this, the church, acting as a regular client, is effectively a benefactor of Sorley’s creative work both in and outside the church.
The words were backed up by the presentation – the interaction and conversation between the two of them during the seminar made the point just as clearly: here was something that worked because of their friendship and mutual confidence.
Broadening this out, maybe we can summarise the importance of relationship in this way: without building trust more adventurous and creative ideas would be dismissed, the community would be impoverished and creatives left frustrated; without regular clients/benefactors the work would be unsustainable.
A similar point comes out in Malcolm Gladwell’s article Late Bloomers. Taking Cézanne as an example he suggests that:
If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.
This is what is so instructive about any biography of Cézanne. Accounts of his life start out being about Cézanne, and then quickly turn into the story of Cézanne’s circle.
…
But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility.
So the first challenge for those wanting in make culture is to make relationships. To lose the caricature of the artist as heroic individual, or to put aside suspicion (depending which side of the fence you are) and to work on building trust and confidence with those around.
Tags: community, culture, Everything Conference
apologetics and the absurd
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
The latest article on the Everything Conference website is an interesting piece on the Theatre of the Absurd, with a tenative embrace of the art-form. Definitely worth a read.
Some of the discussion reminds me of Francis Schaeffer’s approach to apologetics: to talk with people to help them see the logical conclusions of their own worldview. And the difficulty of genuinely living consistently with what they believe. Taking a similar approach via the arts is an interesting idea. Has the potential to be a truly incarnational and compassionate apologetic…
Tags: apologetics, culture, Everything Conference
column :: grace
Posted by Paul | Filed under columns
The final column from 360 magazine (for now)…
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It struck me recently that many superhero stories feature a strange sort of grace. Here’s how it works in the Spiderman series: Peter Parker is a pretty unremarkable guy until an apparently random accident leaves him with extraordinary powers. He’s done nothing to earn or deserve them. He’s not particularly courageous or virtuous. In fact, he doesn’t start out as a particularly heroic character at all.
So, what is it that makes him a hero? As the story unfolds it seems to work in the opposite way to our expectations: rather than virtue being rewarded, it is the new powers that lead him to heroism. Famously, the recurring theme in the Spiderman stories is that ‘with great power comes great reponsibility’. In coming to terms with his powers, the changes in Parker are more than just the ability to climb walls. Maybe it is the same with all acts of grace.
As Mumford and Sons sang recently, “… that’s exactly how this grace thing works/It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart/But the welcome I receive with the restart.”
Tags: column, culture, superheroes
column :: crisis
Posted by Paul | Filed under columns
Yes, another column from 360 magazine…
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Here’s my question: when our culture is in trouble, what should the church do? Maybe we can find some provocation from movies.
Arguably the most famous financial crisis in film history comes in the middle of the classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”. The film’s hero, George Bailey, is just leaving for his honeymoon when there is a run on the bank. In panic, the townspeople want their money. George manages to calm the crowd down, but this still leaves a problem: how are the people going to survive? The solution is creative and sacrificial – the newlyweds help those in need by using their own savings – the money that was going to fund their honeymoon.
In giving what he has to save others, it’s not hard to see George as a Christ-like figure. Perhaps the church too should look for unexpected, creative (maybe even costly) ways to help those in crisis.
Identity, ethics and apologetics
Posted by Paul | Filed under apologetics
Over on Adrian Warnock’s blog, Andrew Wilson has written some ‘guest posts‘ on Tom Wright’s book Justification. This got me thinking about this whole debate again. So, here’s a random thought…
I want to come at it from a different angle. And, as happens for me often right now, that angle is in Tim Keller-like direction.
In his article The Gospel in All it’s Forms, Keller says:
I take a page from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. That is, I use the biblical definition of sin as idolatry. That puts the emphasis not as much on “doing bad things” but on “making good things into ultimate things.”
OK, so what he is doing here is moving the focus in gospel presentations from ethics to identity. But it seems to me that this is exactly what Tom Wright has been doing in his ‘new perspective’ of justification. His reading of Paul is that the Law was a ‘good thing’ that had become ‘ultimate thing’; that the Judaism of Paul’s time had come close to treating the Law as an idol. More than this, and famously, he interprets the big issue that Paul is addressing as the separation between Jews and Gentiles. And that separation being based on observation of the Law. That is, that the issue was that the Jews were building their identity on the Law rather than faith in God. Which, of course, is precisely Keller’s working definition of sin.
In the spirit of Andrew Wilson’s post (‘we can have our cake, and eat it’), we should remind ourselves that this doesn’t require us to reject a gospel presentation that is concerned with ethical questions. This is a big gospel, with deep and wide implications.
Going back to Tim Keller:
…there must be one gospel, yet there are clearly different forms in which that one gospel can be expressed.
And perhaps we can go further. Perhaps, for us, to miss the identity aspect is to miss something important. In a culture where identity floats, it possible to get the beliefs right, get the praxis right and still miss something important.
Tags: apologetics, culture, N.T. Wright, Tim Keller
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...