The next big "cultural good" I'm working on, with a host of partners, is the documentary film-based curriculum ROUND TRIP, which will be released in January. Philanthropy Action's Tim Ogden wrote this great article based on an interview with me about the growing discontent with short-term mission trips as they are all too often practiced—something we hope ROUND TRIP will help to change.

development, ministry, mission, philanthropy, poverty, stewardship, travel

Andy

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[Some doubt] whether it’s even possible to achieve the goals of a real encounter with poverty in a week to 10 days. According to Crouch it is—if the trips are radically different. He suggests three ingredients for trips to have an impact:

1. Make trips a part of a lasting, organization-level partnership: Many youth groups feel they have to go someplace new each year to interest participants. Visiting the same place year after year allows the Americans to begin building more of an understanding of local context and needs, and increases the likelihood that the “help” they offer is actually helpful.

2. Properly set expectations: The more a trip is described as a learning experience rather than an opportunity for an unskilled teenager to “help”, the more likely the trip is to have an impact.

3. Small is beautiful: if personal contact is the sine qua non of such trips, they have to be small enough to allow actual personal contact between Americans and their counterparts.

Still, Crouch doubts that one trip can make a difference:

“The trips only make sense if they are part of a comprehensive program of changing people’s attitudes and behaviors. Evidence is shockingly clear that a single trip has no impact. No matter how well you do a trip, especially when you’re talking about teenagers, they are at such a high-velocity developmental stage that I don’t think any single experience is going to have an ‘impact.’ . . . The organizations that have thought about this the most and are doing the best job are making these trips part of a much longer engagement with the issues. For instance, there’s one organization that requires a year-long commitment and the trip occurs in the middle—they meet just as often after the trip as they do preparing for it. . . . The grooves in our culture are too deep for us to escape without that level of commitment.”

I'm thinking about starting a series to track the little-known numbers and indices that provide a clearer picture of various aspects of our culture than the figures that make the headlines. Call it "the numbers that actually count." Sometime soon I'll explain why you should plug your ears and sing, "La la la, I'm not listening," when any politician talks about cutting "income taxes"—it's not income taxes but payroll taxes that take the biggest bite for many Americans, and any serious tax policy needs to treat the two together. In the meantime, here's another important number at the moment: not the overhyped Dow Jones Industrial Average, but the TED Spread, the blood pressure reading of the global economy. Recently it's been, um, a bit high.

business, economics, finance, statistics

Andy

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Generations of Americans have been trained to follow the Dow Jones Industrial Average for a quick snapshot of how the economy is performing or is expected to perform. There’s a lot that’s ill-advised about that habit, but, most importantly, attending to the ups and downs in the Dow won’t tell you much about the current financial crisis. Ours is a crisis of credit: Financial firms are unwilling to lend to each other (at all-but-exorbitant rates) for fear that borrowing firms may fail or that they themselves may need the cash to fend off their own crisis.

Whereas the hourly fortunes of the Dow or any stock index are, at best, indirect reflections of this reluctance to lend, the TED Spread measures credit conditions directly. Bloomberg tracks the TED Spread here. What sounds like second-rate Nutella is actually the difference between the interest rate banks charge each other on three-month loans and the interest rate on three-month U.S. Treasury bills.

A century ago, it was common for practicing Catholics to only accept the Eucharist once a year, but to go to confession regularly. Now, apparently, it's just the opposite. The reasons behind this are myriad, of course, but at least part of gets at Andy's idea of a posture of cultural consumption supplanting the sorts of disciplines that must be cultivated with diligence and work.

cultural worlds, discipline, gestures and postures, grace, reconciliation

Nate

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The biggest barrier between Catholics and the confessional, however, may be the real effort it requires. Unloading your transgressions on the Internet takes a few computer clicks—you can do it on your coffee break. But done right, Catholic confession demands a rigorous examination of conscience and real contrition, to say nothing of the prayers you may be assigned for penance and the thinking a priest may ask you to do about the ways you’ve let yourself and God down. No wonder we are more comfortable with the Eucharist service, which demands only that we line up like consumers and accept something for free. Dorothy Day wrote of having to “rack your brain for even the beginnings of sin.” That’s work.

We can never really predict what the effects, and interpretations, of our cultural offerings will be in the long run, as the man who cowrote (with Oliver Stone) the iconic 1980s film Wall Street has had ample occasion to discover. Sometimes we're even remembered for the opposite of the point we were trying to convey. Every time I see the phrase "Orwellian" used, I feel a similar sort of empathetic pang for old anti-totalitarian George Orwell.

business, elites, entertainment, horizons of the possible, money, movies

Nate

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Gekko’s character was written to create an engaging, charming, but deceitful and brutal being. I have nevertheless run into quite a number of younger people, who upon discovering that I co-wrote the film, wax rhapsodic about it . . . but often for the wrong reasons.

A typical example would be a business executive or a younger studio development person spouting something that goes like this: “The movie changed my life. Once I saw it I knew that I wanted to get into such and such business. I wanted to be like Gordon Gekko.”

The flattery is disarming and ego-stoking, but then neurons fire and alarm bells go off. “You have succeeded with this movie, but you’ve also failed. You gave these people hope to become greater asses than they may already be.”

A lovely passage on the here and hereafter from the novel that's currently (and belatedly, given the strength of my friends' recommendations) on my bedside table.

heaven, horizons of the possible, iowa, literature, new jerusalem, primordial stories, revelation

Nate

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I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty to it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

I love this story (leaving aside the bizarre and strained reference to a Ouija board in the first sentence of the article). I especially appreciate the potential for reducing injuries in high school players and for making football even more fun to watch. Sport by definition carries an element of physical risk, but anything that minimizes it, at the high school level especially, is a good thing. And it would be fascinating if, thanks to subtle differences in rules, the high school game became more interesting than college- and pro-level football, much as college hockey is widely considered a much better game to watch than pro hockey.

creation, football, high school, sports

Andy

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To its proponents, the A-11 [offense] represents the logical and inevitable evolution of a game that is becoming faster and more spread out at all levels. The alignment diminishes, or eliminates, the need for a traditional offensive line, where players can weigh 300 pounds even in high school. And, coaches say, it reduces injury because it involves glancing blows more than smash-mouth collisions.

To its detractors, the A-11 is a gimmick that cleverly but unfairly takes advantage of a loophole in the rules. To these critics, the offense places an inequitable burden on defenses to determine who is eligible for passes and makes the sport nearly impossible to referee.

Whatever one thinks of the offense, it complies with the current statutes of the National Federation of State High School Associations. And it is as entertaining to watch as it is radical in design.

“My wife says it looks like basketball on grass,” said Coach Johnny Poynter, who has installed the A-11 at Trimble High in Bedford, Ky., fearing injuries would leave his team unable to finish the season in a more conventional offense.

News out of Iceland that doesn't deal with bank failures or the plummeting krona! OK, news might be a stretch, but we could all stand to hear some more Hopelandic these days.

cultural worlds, emotion, europe, iceland, language, music, rock-and-roll

Nate

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According to evolutionary musicology, “Musilanguage” is a proto-linguistic form of communication somewhere in between, on the one hand, emotive grunting/cooing/moaning/what-have-you, and then on the other, semantically/ symbolically appropriate but sonically arbitrary sounds that convey meaning (i.e. words). As most things are when it comes down to it, this particular concept is about gettin’ busy.

In “Descent of Man,” Darwin describes “true musical cadences” used by “some early progenitor of man” to woo the opposite sex (or to get totally whack with the same one). This “musilanguage” — a term coined by neurologist Steven Brown — would ostensibly evolve into language and music, respectively.

The Icelandic post-rock four-piece Sigur Rós is well-known for switching up the emotive and the referential. A made-up language Vonlenska (“Hopelandic” in English), which emulates the cadences of Icelandic without actually meaning anything, peppers their songs up to the current album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (“With a Buzz in Our Ears we Play Endlessly”). Now on tour in Europe, Japan, Canada and the US, the band’s bassist confessed in an interview with Pitchfork media, however, that all the hullaballoo about the nature of their lyrics and linguistic hijinks was, and is, rather hype. For example the title of a track on the last album, “Gobbledigook”, was not so much a comment on how they express themselves, but rather a misspelling of the Icelandic “Gobbldigob”, a word for the clippity-clop of horses’ hooves.