Reading the Times
Someone help me here.
An article in the Sunday Seattle Times took me behind the lines, giving me an up close look at one of the marine battalions going house to house in Fallujah. I've talked about the beheadings before, the way they unnerve me. (Not unexpected - I suspect that's what they're for.) Various civil wars continue around the globe, and the brawl in Detroit is personal war gone local. We've got the Janet Jackson incident, the Terrell Owens incident, Desperate Housewives (which I'll admit I've not seen yet), and the sundry diversions of Reality TV. I've spent much of the day listening to pop music - Avril Lavigne, The Evies, Green Day, Eminem, Britney, Xzibit, Prince, Good Charlotte, and I think I'd better listen to Usher if I'm going to really get it. (I did...he's got a voice.) U2 iPods, the Gap, the Merchants of Cool, hooking up, the battle over marriage and abortion, the mainstreaming of porn, Manhunt: The Search for America's Most Gorgeous Male Model, Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto, the emergent church, the postmodern church, Bobblehead Jesus, Shelley Jackson and the Ineradicable Stain, branding...on and on and on....
Christian engagement with popular culture is a hot topic these days, especially among 20-somethings - as well it should be. A large portion of the culture is obviously in disagreement with social critics such as Neal Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly), Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind), Morris Berman (The Twilight of American Culture), James Twitchell (Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America), Lynne Cheney (Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense and What We Can Do About It ), Robert Bork (Slouching Towards Gomorrah), and others.
I mention these books because they stare at me from my bookshelf, receding a bit, though they have influenced my thinking substantially in the past. They're on the right for sure, cogent books espousing a shared grief over the passing of something, something that is far more profound than some reductionist caricature of a 1950's that never really were. It is hard to imagine that anyone can miss the fact that much of...well, something...has been lost in the past 40 years.
Yes, some losses were good. Segregation, the more blatant sexism that women have at least gained substantial ground on (though there's work still to be done) - these are glad losses. But the loss of the nuclear family, the near-wholesale jettisoning of linear reasoning, the loss of trust in language, the loss of public civility, the loss of reasonable, civil public debate - all these are losses that, in my estimation, have lessened who we are as a people.
However...having said that...
Now comes the hard part: Dallas Willard says that ruling ideas are the hardest things to change in a person, and when changes come, it is a kind of religious conversion, nigh unto emotional and spiritual breakdown.
I'm not there yet, haven't gotten that far, but sometimes I wonder...
The coming age of postmodern, post-Christian culture is swamping me internally - not altogether a bad thing. The conversations about America's role in the global community and the distinct difficulty many Christians have in separating Jesus and Ceasar troubles me. Brian McLaren's call for us to be citizens of the world in the name of Christ strikes me as having the ring of truth. Jesus alignment with the poor continues to stand in deep tension with the materialism of the age, and its a telling thought that if people took Jesus seriously in most of his words about money, the world economy would collapse. Racism, sexism, ageism - these remain serious blind spots. And at church, we keep being told to leave the building and go be the church out there, which always seems uncomfortable - and right on.
And then, of course, there's the war.
§
I started by asking for help.
Just after the first of the year, I'm going to be lecturing (oh, how modern of me - lecturing - got to get that out of my head) some very savvy college students on "The Arts and Culture: A Christian Aesthetic." We're going to talk about God, Glory, Creation, The Nature of Gracious Dominion, Cosmos, The Cultural Mandate, Incarnation...in short, the biblical and theological foundations of making art. We'll talk imagination, metaphor and symbol, the falseness of Gnostic dualism, the primacy of sensory experience, the sacred and profane, and the major strains of aesthetic thought over the past couple of millennia. And finally, we'll turn to their world, the world of pop culture, talking about MTV, Hollywood, The Internet, and everything from comic books to collectibles, exploring points of convergence and divergence between scripture and American Popular Culture.
The arts and culture are media through which we can read the times. But are we, as a people, continuing to nurture the means by which the arts can be read? I wonder. In listening to all those pop artists today, I found their voices compelling, urgent, and full of things worth hearing, mostly about personal loss, identity crisis, sexual fulfillment as a means to experience living when little else touches them, and of course, outrage. What I saw little of was poetry. Metaphor, symbol? Lots of irony, though. We derided President Bush for lack of nuance - funny that the popular songsters don't have a lot either. (I may be wrong, but that was today's listening.)
So what help do I need?
Here I'm going to be fully postmodern and say I don't know what help I need, except I'm finding the times hard to read these days. The old words about faith and art that have been coming out of mouth for years appear to be morphing. My mouth's in motion, but no words yet, and I'm not yet sure what they will be, or what they need to be.
Stay tuned. Much of this blog is going to be trying to figure it out.
If you get any revelations, let me know...
9:07:41 PM
