Culture Making is now archived. Enjoy five years of reflections on culture worth celebrating.
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Posts tagged small towns

3 December 2009
photo America, home of the bizarre
photo
from "The American Festivals Project," by Ross McDermott and Andrew Owen, 2009
The American Festivals Project is a photo and video documentary that explores America’s vast—and strange—variety of small-town festivals. Ross McDermott and Andrew Owen, armed with a grant from National Geographic, cameras, video equipment, laptops, and a waste-vegetable-oil-powered truck, spent the better part of a year traveling to forty-nine states, visiting some of this nation's more bizarre celebrations of culture. You've heard of Mardi Gras and Bonnaroo, but how about the Okie Noodling Festival in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma? The Middle of Nowhere Celebration in Ainsworth, Nebraska? Perhaps, pictured here, the Woolly Worm Festival of Banner Elk, North Carolina?
re: cultural worlds, festivals, small towns
Christy:
20 October 2009
excerpt The soul of small towns
I've read the many reviews of Hollowing Out the Middle—based on a year-long study of a small town in Iowa—with keen interest. One of the great unexplored (or underexplored) areas for Christian culture making is rural America. If, as reviewer Bill Kauffman suggests, the real needs of shrinking small towns have less to do with policy than with "soul," there is an opportunity here for creative life and ministry—not so different from the opportunity that Christians recognized in "inner cities" a generation ago.
re: community, small towns, sociology
Andy:
from "Where Home Is, the Heart Isn't," by Bill Kaufmann, WSJ.com, 20 October 2009

The town recently lost its school to consolidation, a dagger aimed at the heart of a small community, yet the authors mention it only in passing. Any revitalization of rural America must include deconsolidating its schools, breaking up the big education factories in favor of small academies in which each student matters. Numerous federal government policies—in education, national defense and transportation—subsidize hypermobility. Yet neither major political party shows the least inclination to change or even seriously rethink them.

“Hollowing Out the Middle” is a worthy contribution to a conversation we desperately need to have, but the language of policy (“invest more efficiently”) is inadequate to what is really a crisis of the soul. The solution to rural depopulation begins in relearning the value of that simple and underrated word: stay.