Culture Making | Andy Crouch, Nate Barksdale and friends on faith and culture

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.

Odds are you won't want to take the time to read this whole essay—that's why we publish excerpts here at Culture Making!—but it makes one subtle and one smack-upside-the-head point. The smack: "E-learning" doesn't help students learn. At all. Does. Not. Work. Please, educators, stop throwing (our) money at it. The subtlety: Web reading isn't bad, it just isn't the kind of reading schools should be encouraging, which is slow and analog. In the age of technology, as Albert Borgmann has argued, we all have to choose to become analog ascetics. The mark of a quality education will soon become that it teaches students how to unplug, and why that's such a good thing.

books, horizons of the possible, internet, reading, technology and change

Andy

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from "Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind," by Mark Bauerlein, ChronicleReview.com, 19 September 2008 :: via Arts & Letters Daily

The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking. The shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in college classrooms can’t bridge them. Screen reading is a mind-set, and we should accept its variance from academic thinking. [Jakob] Nielsen concisely outlines the difference: “I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don’t believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let’s praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering campfire — or its modern-day counterpart, the PowerPoint projector,” he says. “We should accept that the Web is too fast-paced for big-picture learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At the same time, the Web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets — so long as the learner already has the conceptual framework in place to make sense of the facts.”

So let’s restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off.

One of my least favorite responses when I tell people I am writing on cultural creativity is, "Oh, I'm not creative." Creativity isn't reserved for artists—or, to put it another way, everyone is called to some measure of artistry in some part of their lives. For example, when mowing the outfield.

baseball, gardens and cities, landscape, sports

Andy

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from "Groundskeepers Display Artistry on the Diamond," by John Branch, NYTimes.com, 30 September 2008

Fans tuning in to the playoffs, which begin Wednesday, can expect to see 45-foot-wide swaths in a broadly woven pattern at Fenway Park, cross-hatched diamonds at Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park, straightaway outfield stripes at Dodger Stadium, a classic checkerboard at Wrigley Field, and the mingling three-directional outfield lines at Anaheim’s Angel Stadium, among others planned for the postseason.

Such designs adorn and distinguish nearly every major league ballpark these days, but no one takes as keen an interest in mowing patterns as [David] Mellor. He has written a book on the subject (“Picture Perfect: Mowing Techniques for Lawns, Landscapes, and Sports”), and is generally considered the top grass-cutting artist in the game. High-school geometry classes visit him at Fenway Park to study ways that an odd-shaped field can be divided and subdivided by straight lines and sharp angles.

“I’m not looking for more work,” Mellor said on a recent afternoon at Fenway Park. “But the grass has to be mowed anyway. So why not do it well, with straight lines, or checkerboards, or something more festive?”

I love studies of animal language precisely because, of course, they're generally really just as much about human language and culture. The generous, absurd gesture of translating a Babylonian epic into ape-ish just underscores the point.

animals, gestures and postures, horizons of the possible, language, literature, poetry, translation

Nate

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from "Poetry for Primates," Fed by Birds, 20 September 2008

There’s been increased interest lately in monkey languages after discoveries were made about how putty-nosed monkeys combine sounds to create a basic syntax:

* Hack-hack-hack-hack: “There’s an eagle over there!” * Pyow-hack-hack-pyow-pyow-pyow: “I’ve seen a leopard, let’s move away!” * Hack-hack-hack-pyow-hack-hack-hack-hack-hack “There’s an eagle over there, let’s move away!”

But research at the Great Ape Trust using the sign language Yerkish reveals the primates are capable of far more linguistic sophistication. Primate Poetics sets out a manifesto to enrich this new language, starting, ambitiously, with a translation of the epic Gilgamesh:

“We will learn Yerkish. We will translate human literature into Yerkish. We will invent words, word-tricks, word-jokes, word-games to show the apes new ways of using (their) language. We will become knowledgeable and original enough to be invited by the researchers of the Great Ape Trust to read our Yerkish translation of Gilgamesh to Kanzi, Panbanisha and all the others.

“We are not here to compare and to compete with the ape but to appreciate its language for its own beauty. This is emphatically not about some lone genius monkey penning the Great Primate Novel.”

Once Helen Keller knew what water was, she had to know what everything else was.

—Walker Percy, "Naming and Being"

This looks tasty, especially once I figured out the green slivers weren't avocado.

cultural worlds, food and drink, lebanon, recipes

Nate

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a Hommus & Tabbouli post, by Mag, 15 July 2008 :: via Global Voices Online

Meghli is a kind of Lebanese rice pudding prepared in special occasions especially when a baby is born. It is a tradition to serve it to guests and friends when they come to offer their congratulations. It is also served on Christmas Eve’s dinner along with the Yule Log. Most people nowadays prepare it all the time not only on occasions.

Serves 7-8 (of the same size of the serving bowl shown in the photo)

Ingredients: 1 cup of rice flour 1 cup of sugar 8 cups of water 1 tbsp of ground caraway seeds 1 tbsp ground cinnamon 1 tbsp ground anis seeds

For the topping: Raw almonds, pistachios, walnuts and coconut flakes.

In the cooking pot, add the cups of water, rice flour, whisk or stirr until desolved, then add the sugar until it desolves too. Bring to a boil, then reduce to medium heat. Add the spices: caraway, cinnamon, anis seeds. The pudding can easily stick so you can’t leave it. Stirr until it thickens then transfer into the serving bowls and let it cool. Meanwhile, add water to the alomds and pistachios and let them sit until they soften (about half to an hour or so). Before serving the pudding, top it with coconut flakes, then almonds and pistachios then serve. Or you can decorate the bowls and leave them in the refrigerator.

by Andy Crouch for Culture Making

In December I will have the great delight of helping give away $6,000 to three individuals or teams who have innovative ideas for integrating their Christian faith with their vocation. The Bosscher-Hammond Prizes, sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Graduate and Faculty Ministries, are a juried competition that will culminate during IVCF’s Following Christ 2008 Conference, 27–31 December 2008.

But for the jury I’m chairing to have the maximum delight, we need some really good submissions—and the deadline for initial entries is Wednesday, 15 October.

So, are you, or someone you know, thinking about a project that demonstrates the integration of faith, learning, and practice and that in some way shows “how the academic disciplines and professions can contribute to human flourishing”? And are you, or someone involved with the project, actively affiliated with an institution of higher education or a 2008 graduate of one? Then get yourself on over to the Web site for the prize and send off an executive summary by the deadline, followed by the full submission no more than a month later. (By the way, in additional to the cash prizes for the winners, 26 semifinalists will receive free registration for the Following Christ conference.) I’d love to help recognize your work and vision for cultural creativity, so do apply and—unless your innate competitiveness hasn’t been properly sanctified!—spread the word to others as well.

re: campus ministry, cultivation and creation, education, universities

Promo for "This American Life with Ira Glass," 5 April 2007

Here's the promo for the third episode of the TV version of This American Life, which I've been watching now that it's up on Netflix. The full 30min. story of this painter and his models is, as one would expect from Ira Glass and Nancy Updike, fascinating and beautiful. For me it was also a welcome reminder that it isn't that hard to see the image of the outcast even in such a cringingly Caucasian representation of Jesus.

fashion, jesus as culture-maker, mormon, painting, tv, utah, video

Nate

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Andy Warhol—who along with being a painter of soup cans was a volunteer at soup kitchens—would doubtless be pleased.

failure, finance, food and drink, horizons of the possible, poverty, wealth

Nate

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from "Goodbye 1 Billion Salary Hello Campbell Soup," by Henry Blodget, Yahoo! Finance, 30 September 2008 :: via The .plan

Campbell Soup Co. was the only stock in the S&P 500 that escaped yesterday’s historic sell-off. That’s right: 499 fell, and just one rose.

Could there be a clearer metaphor for Americans refocusing on the basics after a decade of greed and excess?

A great example of culture-making in America's prisons. Canned mackeral's value as a currency (as opposed to just a means of barter) is apparently that a) it's cheap, and b) few inmates actually want to eat it.

cultural worlds, food and drink, horizons of the possible, prison

Nate

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from "Mackerel Economics in Prison Leads to Appreciation for Oily Fillets," by Justin Scheck, The Wall Street Journal, 2 October 2008 :: via Marginal Revolution

When Larry Levine helped prepare divorce papers for a client a few years ago, he got paid in mackerel. Once the case ended, he says, “I had a stack of macks.”

Mr. Levine and his client were prisoners in California’s Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex. Like other federal inmates around the country, they found a can of mackerel—the “mack” in prison lingo—was the standard currency.

“It’s the coin of the realm,” says Mark Bailey, who paid Mr. Levine in fish. Mr. Bailey was serving a two-year tax-fraud sentence in connection with a chain of strip clubs he owned. Mr. Levine was serving a nine-year term for drug dealing. Mr. Levine says he used his macks to get his beard trimmed, his clothes pressed and his shoes shined by other prisoners. “A haircut is two macks,” he says, as an expected tip for inmates who work in the prison barber shop.

There’s been a mackerel economy in federal prisons since about 2004, former inmates and some prison consultants say. That’s when federal prisons prohibited smoking and, by default, the cigarette pack, which was the earlier gold standard.

God never allows human culture to become solely the site of rebellion and judgment; human culture is always, from the very beginning, also marked by grace.

—Culture Making, p.124

from "Super Kingdom," by London Fieldworks (Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson), opened 21 September 2008 at Stour Valley Arts in Kent, England :: via designboom

From a series of site-specific "show homes" inspired by the hibernation patterns of local animals. "Amazing birdhouses" doesn't quite seem to capture it all, but I think it might be roughly accurate. For me the symbolic resonances that jumped out from this particular image were: the Tower of Babel and Noah's Ark—or, come to think of it—a cross between the Garden of Eden and the New Jerusalem.

animals, art, babel, england, gardens and cities, noah's ark, photography

Nate

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Translation is always a more complex business than you'd initially think.

cultural worlds, english, french, language, literature, translation, writing

Nate

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"The Mountain of ‘Les Mis’," a NYTimes.com Ideas Blog post, 29 September 2008

Literature | A new English translation of Hugo’s sprawling and digressive “Les Misérables” is 100,000 words longer than its best-known predecessor. So it draws attention to the translator’s mission of sticking to an author’s intent. Or in some cases not? In America, the 1863 “Confederate” edition, unlike a rival “Yankee” edition, “struck out all references to slavery.” [TLS]

Even for religious artists, Roger Kimball suggests, the goal of art in a secular age is not simply to directly serve the sanctuary. But if art ceases to acknowledge both religion and beauty, it "degenerates into a caricature of itself." This is a fine line drawn by a fine essay, well worth pondering if you are an artist or one who serves them.

art, beauty, horizons of the possible

Andy

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from "The End of Art," by Roger Kimball, First Things, June/July 2008 :: via Arts and Letters Daily

Fra Angelico, a deeply religious painter, was a great artist, but then so was Titian, a conspicuously worldly one. Bach was a pious soul and was possibly the greatest composer who ever lived, but what about Beethoven? If he was religious it was in a vastly different sense. Jane Austen was conventionally religious in her personal life, but her novels achieve greatness through their secular wit and wisdom. Art and religion are both eulogistic words: Calling something a work of art endows it with a nimbus of value; the same is true of religious. But is that the same sort of value?

The twentieth-century Welsh Catholic poet David Jones had it right when he suggested that “no integrated, widespread, religious art, properly so-called, can be looked for outside enormous changes in the character and orientation and nature of our civilization”—changes, I think, that would be deeply at odds with our commitment to liberal democracy. Jones agrees that it would be nice if “the best of man’s creative powers” were “at the direct service of the sanctuary.” But that can happen only “if the epoch itself is characterized by those qualities.” It is not, he goes on to note, a matter of will: What is possible to the artist in the way of creating religious art “has little or nothing to do with the will or wishes of this or that artist.” Be a painter ever so pious, he cannot “change himself into an artist of some other culture-sequence.” Some things were possible in the Middle Ages that are not possible today.

The real threat to the arts, Jones thought, was the modern world’s increasing submission to technocracy, to a thoroughly instrumental view of life that had no room for what Jones called the intransitive—for the freedom and disinterestedness traditionally thought the province of religious experience, on the one hand, and aesthetic experience, on the other.

30 September 2008

A great profile of the day-to-day thoughtfulness required of the folks in charge of Flickr's online community-building.

communities, cultural worlds, internet, photography

Nate

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from "Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com," by Chris Colin, SF Gate, 29 September 2008 :: via kottke.org

Lest your inner libertarian objects to such interventions, Champ is quick to correct the idea that the community would ultimately find its own balance.

“The amount of time it would take for the community to self-regulate—I don’t think it could sustain itself in the meantime,” she says. “Anyway, I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own.”

In this sense, Champ doesn’t just shepherd along the Flickr ethos; she’s a larger advocate of intelligent growth in an often chaotic zone.

“People become disassociated from one another online. The computer somehow nullifies the social contract,” she says. In other words, people sometimes go nuts amid the anonymity of the Internet.

30 September 2008

A page from the "Nepal Horse Book," date unspecified, from the Oriental art collection of Copenhagen's Royal Library :: via BibliOdyssey

I love the possibility left by the fourth, blank quadrant, especially if you buck tradition and read it like the page of a comic book. Up till now, my sole bit of horse-related Nepal trivia was that there's a remote valley in the west called Mustang, whose familiar name is entirely a linguistic coincidence but still evocative—I picture a Shangri-La of Fords and horses.

animals, art, asia, cultural worlds, horses, manuscripts, nepal, painting

Nate

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five_questions

1

What do bicycles assume about the world?

2

What do bicycles assume about the way the world should be?

3

What do bicycles make possible?

4

What do bicycles make impossible (or at least a lot more difficult)?

5

What new culture is created in response to bicycles?

Join the conversation >

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.

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Ben, professor of management
living in Winneconne, Wisconsin