culture

Andy Crouch in his review of Gordon Smith’s Institutional Intelligence for Cardus:

This [fading Christian cultural backdrop] could be good news for Christian institutions—calling us away from the temptation of self-serving religious isolation into meaningful partnership with our neighbours who do not share our faith. But in an environment where Christianity is no longer taken for granted as the cultural background, the leader whose institutional intelligence is mostly directed inward toward their own members and staff, or upward toward their board and donors, may be missing the most important institutional dimension of all. We have to embrace the outward work of sustaining partnerships for the common good in an increasingly incomprehending, suspicious, and polarized world.

Rachael Starke writing on “sexual assault: a problem that crosses centuries” for Fathom:

Allard sees humanity, especially as influenced by culture, as “unsafe.” But the Christian worldview disagrees—the problem with Allard’s diagnosis is not that it’s too dark, but that it’s not dark enough. We are, all of us, far worse than merely “unsafe.” We are capable of sheer evil. But just as Christians believe the human problem is far greater, we believe just as strongly that an answer for our problem exists, one with power to not just make safe, but to make us truly good.

Few characters in the Old Testament exemplify this hope better than Boaz.

Here’s another example of academic inquiry and debate being threatened on college campuses. But this time with a faint hope: here come the freshmen.

Chris Bodenner in the The Atlantic:

Another student from India, Jagannath, responded to the canceled lecture by organizing a freshman-only meeting on the quad. “For us to rise out of this culture of private concerns, hatred, and fear, we need to find a way to think, speak, and act together,” he wrote in a mass email. Jagannath told me that upperclassmen warned him he was “very crazy” to hold a public meeting, but it was a huge success; about 150 freshmen showed up and, by all accounts, their debate over [Humanities] 110 was civil and constructive. In the absence of Facebook and protest signs, the freshmen were taking back their class.

With faculty, administrations, and upperclassmen largely paralyzed by identity politics, perhaps it’s the college freshmen who will help to right the higher-ed ship.

Note too that it’s not placards and Facebook posts that are helping to counter the toxicity at Reed; it’s courageous in-person dialogue.

A minister blogs his experience of visiting a traditional church and an “atheist church” on the same Sunday:

Both were attended by a crowd of fashionable-looking young adults, mainly in their twenties and thirties. Although the sizes of the venues differed — HTB was bigger — both were nearly full. The form of the gathering was also very comparable. Both had a variety of notices and announcements, a collection taken during the ‘service’, tea and coffee for those attending, and ‘welcome’ information was available for newcomers. However, the parallels went deeper, too.

Judy Wu Dominick for Christianity Today:

[We] admitted our tendency to recognize other people’s tribalism but less often our own. Consequently, we realized that we accuse our ideological opponents of dehumanizing vitriol while feeling perfectly justified in dehumanizing and abusing them. We also acknowledged our tendency to equate people with their ideas. This reductionism prevents us from learning the human stories behind the ideas—and when we don’t apply effort to learning those stories, we fail to become instruments of healing, justice, and reconciliation.

Emma Green on Radio Atlantic:¹

I think that the urban/rural divide is the single most overlooked fracture in American religion, and particularly in the American church. With religious minorities… the enclaves are urban, concentrated populations where everybody in those communities is religious. But I think in Christianity, because it’s so huge and spread out, there are radically different orientations for those people who are in cities, and those people who are in suburbs, and more rural country.

More in the full podcast, including conversation about “how everyone, ‘religious’ or not, wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves, something transcendent.”

Footnotes

1. Only a couple of weeks since launch, Radio Atlantic is already climbing to the top of my favorite podcasts. ↩

Liz Gumbinner on teaching kids about email:

When I finally broke down and got my daughter an email account (all my friends have one! actually does work sometimes) we had the long, requisite discussions about safety, etiquette, and responsibility. But wow, it turns out there’s so much more than that. Especially because most of her friends seem to have been given accounts without any tips or tutorials at all. No judgments there; it’s just that I think email seems so everyday to all of us, and some of the protocol is now so intuitive, it hasn’t even crossed most parents’ minds.

Super practical. Remember when your parents taught you ______? The right way to use email has to be taught too.

British Library Board blog:

Damien Kempf of the University of Liverpool noticed an image of Yoda hiding in one of the British Library’s medieval manuscripts. The green-skinned, big-eared figure with tufty hair bears a surprising resemblance to the character designed by Stuart Freeborn for Lucasfilm almost 700 years later. Kempf’s ‘Yoda’ was one of several fantastical creatures reproduced in the book Medieval Monsters.

This is not the only ‘Yoda’ to be found in a medieval manuscript. Since the ‘Yoda’ discovered by Damien Kempf was featured on this blog, other people have told us about more ‘Yodas’ they have noticed among the British Library’s manuscripts. These include a collection of romances and stories complied for a middling member of the Yorkshire gentry to a deluxe, multi-volume book of hours once owned by Emperor Charles V.

May the 4th Be With You.

Jen Pollock Michel interviews Andy Crouch on his new book, The Tech-Wise Family:

[Andy:] Whenever you raise a criticism about technology, people will commonly say, “Well, technology can be used for good or for bad.” But I think more interesting questions are, “What is technology good for?” and “What is technology bad for?” Technology is good for lots of things. But what it is not good for—and perhaps what it is actively bad for—is the formation of persons. And where are people formed most intensively? For all of us, that is in the context of family. That’s where the dangers and limitations of technology become most evident. I’m much less concerned about how we use technology when we’re waiting in a line at the airport, even though I don’t deny that there is something formative (and de-formative) about needing my screen to distract me when I feel the least soupçon of boredom. But that is not as critical as [the family context].

Aanna Greer on talking to your kids about sexuality:

The truth is that your kids will sin and eventually they will sin sexually. No amount of preparation or good parenting will prevent this. Make sure that you yourself have a biblical perspective on sin and grace and that you teach this to your children. Sin is wrong, but God’s grace is big. Don’t let them ever believe the lie that they must be perfect in order to be loved and accepted by God or by you. As a parent, you should expect them to sin. It is not your children’s good behavior, but the power of the cross that saves them.

Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic:

But somewhere along the way, we decided that we wanted the values of a Las Vegas lounge act to become part of our most important civic conversation. So the stunt, the shtick, the mildly embarrassing question — soon President Bubba, well on his way to reelection, would be telling an MTV crowd whether he wore boxers or briefs — became an essential campaign feature, and now we have a reality-TV star for president. You could argue that by giving Trump a noogie, Fallon did the responsible thing: He subjected the man to one of the requisite tests of fitness for office. We created our own black hole, and we collapsed into it.

Excoriating. And perhaps the most incisive article I’ve read this year.

Business Insider summary American Nations by Colin Woodard:

[A]ward-winning author Colin Woodard identifies 11 distinct cultures that have historically divided the US.

“The country has been arguing about a lot of fundamental things lately including state roles and individual liberty,” Woodard, a Maine native who won the 2012 George Polk Award for investigative reporting, told Business Insider.

“[But] in order to have any productive conversation on these issues,” he added, “you need to know where you come from. Once you know where you are coming from it will help move the conversation forward.”

Not a new article, but relevant nevertheless. I like that Woodard has considered the frontiers of each of the 11 “nations” purely culturally rather than arbitrarily relating them to existing geopolitical borders.

[A]mong these 11 nations, Yankeedom and the Deep South exert the most influence and are constantly competing with each other for the hearts and minds of the other nations.

“We are trapped in brinkmanship because there is not a lot of wiggle room between Yankee and Southern Culture,” Woodard says. “Those two nations would never see eye to eye on anything besides an external threat.”

Sounds about right.

Ben Sasse speaking about “what Washington has to do with Jerusalem:”

Increasingly, we live in an age when people want to project great meaning on politics. This won’t work. We live in a time when people want the dividing line — the Manichaean line between good and evil — to run between political parties. It’s not going to fulfill them. It’s not going to satisfy them. We live in an age that yearns for a city that has foundations; that’s normal, that’s natural…

Update: During the interview portion, Sasse is asked what’s been surprising as a senator. His response: “I’ve realized that if you say, ‘Washington shouldn’t be your god,’ that some people respond that they want to kill you. That’s a surprise.”

Breakpoint:

Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option” is one of the most anticipated and talked-about Christian books in recent memory. How do Christians carry on and live out the faith in this “new Dark Age,” as Dreher puts it? We’ve asked leading Christian writers and thinkers to share their thoughts on “The Benedict Option.”

I haven’t yet read Dreher’s book, but the opinions expressed in these reflections vary widely.

Update: Andy Crouch gives one of the clearest and most succinct summaries of “BenOp” and its controversy.

Another update:“Ten theses” on BenOp from Andrew Wilson.

Two of today’s best thinkers in one forum:

Watch on YouTube