in defence of sad songs (3)
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’d better get the next post in this ‘series’ written before Jonny beats me to it…
Tags: art, culture, imagination, lament, music
in defence of sad songs (2 1/2)
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.
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
Things I found this week
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
Had a bit of an mp3 binge this week (train delays and long walks at lunch time). Here are the highlights:
Jonny recommended Spirituality of the Cellphone to me. It’s a talk from (Rob Bell’s) Mars Hill. In it Shane Hipps discusses what the church can learn from Marshall McLuhan. The Medium is the Message applied to everything from burning bushes to mobiles. Very interesting.
On the podcast from (Mark Driscoll’s) Mars Hill, a talk from one of their worship pastors — Tim Smith — called Continuous Worship. Not quite what I was expecting from the title — it takes a look who we interact with culture (in fact, it has a reasonable amount in common with the seminar I blogged earlier in the year). Worth a listen if you want an introduction to that whole area.
Seattle Pacific University have loads of really interesting talks available on iTunes U…
Gregory Wolfe (author of the brilliant Intruding on the Timeless) has a talk there Celebrate God with your Imagination. A short discussion of the importance of the imagination in the Christian life. I’m constantly find myself coming back to this so loved this talk.
They also have Darkness on the Edge of Town: The Gospel of Hope according to Bruce Springsteen. I mean, really, what more could you want on your daily commute than an exposition of Springsteen as ‘sonic mystic’, including the influence of Flannery O’Conner on his song writing? (Also with an object lesson on the medium-is-the-message, by way of a discussion on how Springsteen uses the form of the music to reflect the lyrical content.)
Finally, two from Steven Garber. His book Fabric of Faithfulness is a classic on relating belief to life, especially for students. Who Do You Love? and Weaving Together Belief and Behaviour are two talks based on this. Just listen and you too will want to change the world…
Tags: art, culture, mp3s, web sights, worldview
Considering Culture (finale)
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
As we finish up this set of posts (at last), I want to use two quotes. The first is from an article by Craig Bartholomew (quoting Tom Wright)
We have to tell the story in our communities and allow it to challenge our traditions, to ‘stretch our reason back into shape, and to reform our world views that are always in danger of becoming like the world’s world views.’ In respect of this last point Wright is clear that we need to allow Scripture to norm our world view:
When we tell the whole story of the Bible, and tell it … by articulating it in a thousand different ways, improvising our own faithful version, we are inevitably challenging more than just one aspect of the world’s way of looking at things … We are articulating a viewpoint according to which there is one God, the creator of all that is, who not only made the world but is living and active within it… who is also transcendent over it and deeply grieved by its fall away from goodness into sin … The story … will function as an invitation to participate in the story oneself, to make it one’s own, and to do so by turning away from the idols which prevent the story becoming one’s own … Evangelism and the summons to justice and mercy in society are thus one and the same, and both are effected by the telling of the story, the authoritative story …
This takes us back to our starting point — the biblical story. However we shouldn’t view this as a staid and static base; we listen to the text, ‘tell the story in our communities and allow it to challenge our traditions’. We have to continual keep in mind that our communities will never completely and faithfully embody the text. We have to make a conscious effort to allow our story to ‘stretch our reason back into shape, and to reform our world views’; otherwise we may find that our worldview starts to blend with the ones around us. If the salt loses its saltiness…
We then allow our re-stretched reason/imagination/worldview to spill out into our cultural life. We must chose to tell and live according to the real story and invite others to participate in that story with us. And it is by living the real story that our cultural activities are transformed to fit with God’s plan for creation.
The second quote is taken completely out of context, but I love it and it sums up for me the motivation behind all of this. It comes from the song ‘So Long Sweet Misery’ by Brett Dennen:
…
if I could I would wash all these wounds away
I would surround your room with sentiments of grace
I would paint your portrait over everything mundane
…
That surely is our goal — to paint the portrait of Jesus over everything, mundane or otherwise, to declare in our actions the beauty, justice and truth of the way God intends the world to be.
Tags: art, culture, Culture Seminar, story, worldview
Things I found this week…
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
I stumbled across a number of great web sights this week…
First, Byron Borger has a wonderous article Why we are open to the Emergent Conversation: My journey, and books along the way. A sort of reading-biography following his path from Schaeffer, via Os Guinness, Middelton and Walsh, etc., to recent Emergent publications. A good discussion of Chistianity-in-all-of-life and a defence of why conservative Christians can happily read emerging books.
I am not exactly ready to brand myself emergent and I have deep loyalties to conservative Reformed doctrine, evangelical para-church ministries and institutions, and rather mainline expressions of congregational life. We’ve lived in intentional community, been arrested in peace witnesses, and lived in the inner city; we’ve read critiques of Enlightenment rationalism before anybody knew who Derrida was, and we’ve loved rock and roll culture even when our best friends were listening to only Larry Norman and LoveSong. Does that make us emergent? Not exactly. I’m not bragging at all, not even saying we’ve been right in all of this, just saying that to me, this emergent stuff makes sense to be talking about.
…
They ask big questions about hard Biblical matters and want to be authentic and real, without any churchy pretense. They want to impact the world, and are gladly moving towards social justice concerns, getting involved in human rights initiatives and social action missions.
This made my week. Not only does he run the bookshop I always dreamed of starting, Borger is a hero — truly generous and thought-provoking.
Elsewhere, I discovered lowercase people a very interesting on-line magazine from David Dark and friends. Subtitled “the on-line magazine for artists in action.”
lowercase people is a daring new endeavor to revolutionize the way we view beauty, truth and humanity.
…
lowercase people is the collective effort of a community of thinkers, musicians, artists and writers. We are humanity beautiful and broken. We want to see change. We want to dream bigger dreams. We want to collide. We want to make better art and better music. We’re curious. We’re moving outside of the lines. We’re thinking out-loud. We are the lowercase people. Consider joining us as we begin to dream and think out loud.
Finally, there is a new book out about faith and cinema: Faith, Film and Philosophy: Big Ideas on the Big Screen. Dallas Willards contribution is available on-line: Liberation Through Sensuality: Cinematic Moral Vision in an Age of Feeling. Definitely worth a look. In 10 pages he gets from Pleasantville to
…the person of good moral character does not stand back and hope for something to happen, so they won’t have to soil their hands. Rather, they act for the greater good in the situation—often, to be sure, “with fear and trembling”—but they do act. They act with genuine love, as a matter of the will and character, not just feeling. This is what it means to be responsible.
Tags: art, cinema, culture, web sights, worldview
stewardship of language
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I read the quote in the last post while thinking about mankind’s role as steward of creation. Let’s follow Richard Middleton in the view that everything is part of creation not just the physical objects. (And how can we not, as Christians?) Then we have to think of language as something that we are to steward. It seems to me that this is exactly what Steve Turner is describing — a stewarding of the gift of language to ensure that it does not atrophe, but remains alive and active; so that it fulfils the purpose for which it was given.
Perhaps we can say that, in Christian perspective, one of the values of literature and poetry is to steward language in an appropriately God-honouring way. To quote Turner “The arts can … refresh the language. Poetry, for example, … helps words retain their meaning because it acknowledges that corrupt language results in corrupt thinking.”
But lets not hang around the theoretical corner of the playground. What might this lead to in practice? When it comes to religious language it has to mean that we refuse to restrict our talk to cliches and we move to find fresh expressions. For instance, we can’t let ‘born again’ continue on as a meaningless label. We have to find some way to link back to the radical-ness of the original image and the undertones of new creation. (Thank to Steve Stockman and, indirectly, Bono, for this pointer — see Stockman’s book ‘Walk On’.)
We have to refresh our religious talk so that it hits us again and forces our minds to be transformed. We can’t live with catch-phrases that are just there as arbitrary signifiers with forgotten underlying content.
[As an aside -- Turner is a poet, so the reason for his focus is clear. I wonder if we can extend this to those who use images. That visual artists have a responsibility to ensure that images to not be come cliched and meaning-less...]
Tags: art, culture, Imagine (Steve Turner)
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...