Culture Making is now archived. Enjoy five years of reflections on culture worth celebrating.
For more about the book and Andy Crouch, please visit andy-crouch.com.

excerpt Ask the Poles
Andy:
from "The Glory of Poland," by Roger Cohen, NYTimes.com, 12 April 2010

Poland should shame every nation that believes peace and reconciliation are impossible, every state that believes the sacrifice of new generations is needed to avenge the grievances of history. The thing about competitive victimhood, a favorite Middle Eastern pastime, is that it condemns the children of today to join the long list of the dead.

For scarcely any nation has suffered since 1939 as Poland, carved up by the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, transformed by the Nazis into the epicenter of their program to annihilate European Jewry, land of Auschwitz and Majdanek, killing field for millions of Christian Poles and millions of Polish Jews, brave home to the Warsaw Uprising, Soviet pawn, lonely Solidarity-led leader of post-Yalta Europe’s fight for freedom, a place where, as one of its great poets, Wislawa Szymborska, wrote, “History counts its skeletons in round numbers” — 20,000 of them at Katyn.

It is this Poland that is now at peace with its neighbors and stable. It is this Poland that has joined Germany in the European Union. It is this Poland that has just seen the very symbols of its tumultuous history (including the Gdansk dock worker Anna Walentynowicz and former president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski) go down in a Soviet-made jet and responded with dignity, according to the rule of law.

So do not tell me that cruel history cannot be overcome. Do not tell me that Israelis and Palestinians can never make peace. Do not tell me that the people in the streets of Bangkok and Bishkek and Tehran dream in vain of freedom and democracy. Do not tell me that lies can stand forever.

Ask the Poles. They know.

Nate:
from "slow reading," by Dan Visel, if:book, 8 April 2010

This is a fantastic idea, which makes me wish I were in Boulder to be part of it. I like the idea of this kind of slow and detailed “reading”: to take a work of art & to lavish time on it. It seems, in our age of media overload, almost luxurious: this idea of devoting so much time to one text. In eight hours, we can see four movies. To give that much time to one seems decadent. But maybe this is what works of art deserve; maybe this is how we should be reading. The problem of availability is something that seems increasingly to have been solved. To view or to read well is another kind of problem. In the past, when there was an economy based on scarcity, this might not have been as much of an issue: whatever was available was watched or read. Now we need to think about how we want to watch: we need to become better readers.

Andy:
from "The U.S., one bowl of chili at a time," by Jason Panella, Comment, 9 April 2010

My year-long exploration of the United States is—so far, at least—surprisingly cost-efficient. My trip from the state of Washington to Pennsylvania, for instance, only cost around $9. If I keep this up, I’ll be able to smell the smells and taste the tastes from the Atlantic to the Pacific—non-contiguous states and the District of Columbia included—for a little over $100. And it’ll keep me fed in the process. So far, this journey has taught me a lot about myself, about discipline, about improvisation under pressure, and an awful, awful lot about chili.

Chili. Chili con carne, or “peppers with meat” in Spanish. Simply meat and chili peppers, if you’re a purist (plus a lot of other ingredients, if you’re not). OK, so I’m not actually traveling from state to state, but instead I’ve been using Jane and Michael Stern’s Chili Nation (Random House, 1999) cookbook as a tour guide. The Sterns made stops in each state and collected recipes that they felt captured some of the local flavour—coffee-accented chili from the state of Washington, chili with seafood in place of beef from Maryland, a flavourful dish popularized by some of the diners on Mississippi’s Route 61, and so on.

So, in lieu of spending a year traveling, I thought I’d let my tastebuds and stomach take a trip instead. Fifty-one chili recipes in 52 weeks. One chili a week, with one week off (which I’ll probably cash in on my honeymoon, but my fiancée likes chili too, so maybe not!)

Nate:
from "It's the Trees," by Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG, 11 April 2010

One of the most memorable posts on Pruned, I think, was written way back in September 2005, when Alex took a look at what he called “litter-free landscapes and the politics of pollen.” He quoted horticulturalist Thomas Leo Ogren at length:

In our urban landscapes we now have the most manipulated kind of city forest ever seen. In the past twenty years landscapers have grown inordinately fond of using male trees. In dioecious species (separate-sexed) there are separate male trees and separate female ones. Female trees and shrubs do not produce any pollen, ever, but they do produce messy seeds, fruits, old flowers, and seedpods. Landscapers and city arborists consider this female byproduct to be “litter”, and they don’t like to see it lying on our sidewalks.

In other words, urban landscapers over-utilize pollen-intensive plantlife—which, in turn, wildly amplifies seasonal allergies. What if you didn’t need more boxes of Claritin, then—you need a more informed city parks department?

"Culture Making on the Road," by Andy Crouch and Nathan Clarke
Nathan:
Nate:
a Freakonomics Blog post, 7 April 2009

Karan Talwar, a blogger and Freakonomics reader, writes about an interesting traffic nudge near Shimla, India.  The roads into Shimla are notoriously dangerous, and traffic signs have done little to lessen the problem.  So local authorities began constructing temple shrines at hot spots.  The nudge worked like a charm: “Turns out even though the average Indian has no respect for traffic laws and signs, they will slow down before any place of worship and take a moment to ask for blessings!”

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

—last line of Orson Welles' unproduced screenplay The Big Brass Ring

newsIntroducing Nathan Clarke

I’m happy to announce a new contributor to the Culture Making Web site, filmmaker Nathan Clarke. My cultural collaboration with Nathan began with the series of documentary shorts collected in Where Faith and Culture Meet, when he was a senior producer with 2100 Productions.

Nathan has since established his own production company, Fourth Line Films, which not only has continued to collaborate with Christianity Today and me on projects like Round Trip and The Global Conversation, but also created a documentary short on local food for HDNet and produced a fun short film on hog wrestling in uttermost Wisconsin—which you can view in all its glory below. Suffice to say his interests are impressively varied, just like this site!

In 2010 Nathan and I are exploring new ways to create media and experiences that build on Culture Making and my new work on creative power. We’ll be posting some short videos this spring from recent speaking engagements, and Nathan will join Nate, Christy, and me in spotting and sharing cultural creativity worth celebrating. Welcome, Nathan!

—Andy Crouch

Andy:
from "The Attack of the Zombies," by Andrew Root, Fuller Youth Institute, April 2010

For most of human history our social lives were organized by communities and the traditions and rituals that they upheld and protected.  But modernity, for good or ill, has freed us from this fundamental need for community.  We turned over the job of ordering our social world from communities to institutions. It is institutions, and not communities, that we depend upon. It is institutions that don’t know my name (most know me as number) or my story (only my balance or record) that I have built my life around. It seems that I can live without my parents or friends but not without my ATM card, driver’s license, and Internet access. I can live without knowing anything about my great-grandparents but I must know my Social Security number and credit rating.

Or to put it more pointedly, who would take care of my family if I died in the next few years? Who would make sure my mortgage was paid and my wife had money to maintain her life? Not my community, not my church, not even my extended family. They may all help, dropping off a casserole and offering a shoulder to cry on, but their job, we assume, would be emotional support. No, if I died it would not be a community that would take care of my kids and wife; it would be an institution, the insurance company I’ve been paying to provide for them if the monster of death takes me sooner rather than later. For most of human history this was the work of the community: widows and orphans were to be cared for by uncles, aunts, and neighbors. Their emotional, but most fundamentally their basic financial and material, needs were the responsibility of those who knew them and were part of their story. This was not easy and I’m sure a burden, but it was dependable and communal.

What do we do, and what is our future, when institutions (i.e., insurance companies, various governmental agencies) continue to show us they cannot always be trusted to care for anything other than their own survival? Most of our institutions are what Ulrich Beck calls “Zombie institutions.” They are still moving and breathing, but they have become more haunting than helpful because they are more dead than alive. Standing in late modernity there is more than a little despair knowing that we cannot go back to the tradition-based community, but that the institutions of modernity are ghouls.

photo
photo via "Open Air Library Wins European Prize for Public Space," arkinet, 29 March 2010
Nate:

Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer;
Death is strong, but Life is stronger;
Stronger than the dark, the light;
Stronger than the wrong, the right.

—Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)

by Andy Crouch for Culture Making


Why is this night different from all other nights?

“At least he didn’t suffer,”
no one whispered, nor
“Now he is at peace.”
All those consolations
were denied them.

His eyes had been wild with pain.
In the grave who gives G–d praise?

The only miracle, so to speak,
was that death had come so quickly.

In that restless Sabbath darkness
(even as Sheol was sundered)
they huddled, shuddered,
watched, and wondered.
 

Nate:
from Precious and the Puggies, Chapter Twa, by Alexander McCall Smith, translatit intae Scots by James Robertson and wi bonnie illustrations by Iain McIntosh, 2010 :: via MetaFilter

Whit wid ye dae if ye fund yersel face tae face wi a muckle lion? Staund as still as a stookie? Mak yer feet yer freens and rin? Creep awa quiet-like? Mibbe ye wid jist steek yer een and hope that ye were haein a dream – which is whit Obed did at first when he saw the frichtsome lion starin strecht at him. But when he opened his een again, the lion wis aye there, and whit wis waur, wis stertin tae open its muckle mooth. Precious sooked in her braith. ‘Did ye see his teeth?’ she spiered. Obed noddit his heid. ‘The moonlicht wis gey bricht,’ he said. ‘His teeth were white and as sherp as muckle needles.’

image
from New World Order," featuring map art by Shannon Rankin, BLDGBLOG, 31 March 2010
Nate:

The quotations, images, and embedded media in this blog are the work of the credited authors, artists, and publications, and are employed in the spirit of fair use, commentary, and criticism. We always link to the original source of material we cite. If you think we’ve missed something, let us know. The inclusion of media on this site should not imply its owners’ endorsement (or for that matter awareness) of this book, blog, or the blog’s curators and commentators. Though we hope they’d like us.

I can’t recall a time when I’ve had to read anything other than the Scriptures so slowly and deliberately—Culture Making was that thought provoking.


?

Ben, professor of management
living in Winneconne, Wisconsin

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