These are notes from a Ken Myers lecture I recently attended. A very similar lecture is available on this page, first lecture at the top. (here is a direct link to the zipped mp3). I found it a very helpful and informative way of looking and thinking about culture.

I’ll start off with this quote: “Cultures are more like ecosystems then encyclopedias. They’re not a collection of static, inert, and abstract components that can be switched out. Cultures are more like organisms then mechanisms.“  Because of this we cannot understand a single part (song or movie) without understanding how that specific artifact relates to the whole and to broader movements and moods.  Ken Myers suggest the following parts or members of this ecosystem:

1. Artifacts:
-Material Things, or groups of things
-Specific books or TV Shows (Harry Potter or Lost)
-Clothing, buildings, food etc.
Artifacts can be produced by:

2. Institutions:
-Specific Newspapers but also communications media
-Texas A&M University but also the general institution of higher education
Institutions encourage certain:

3. Practices:
-Both formal and informal
-Graduations and Superbowl parties
-Vacations and shopping
-Can be thought of as liturgies
Practices shape and are shaped by:

4. Beliefs:
-Knowledge, Ideas, creeds etc
(Sometimes we protestants tend to focus only on this)
Beliefs are influenced by:

5. Sensibilities (or moods)
Cultures tend to have dominant moods or sensibilities:
-Russian Melancholy
-Yankee ingenuity
-Southern Charm
These can make certain ideas (beliefs) more or less plausible
Moods are conveyed by artifacts and institutions
Our sensibilities encourage certain:

6. Deep Assumptions:
-”An intuitive sense of the way things are.”
-a kind of Meta-Belief
-How we lean into life (how do we posture ourselves to our creator?)
-Deeper then Beliefs (#4)
Sometimes these can contradict our beliefs

Not sure how many people are familiar with the band Superchick.  I remember seeing them play at the Door back in the day.  Myself and many of my friends really enjoyed their debut CD, Karaoke Superstars - haven’t really kept up with them since then.  Anyway, I was re-listening to this CD the other day while unpacking kitchen boxes and part of the chorus from the song Super Trooper made me laugh/think.

And I’m sorry that I’m getting on your case
But true friends, they stab you in the face

I thought it was pretty clever.  In all seriousness though, the point (I suppose) is that people who actually care about you tell it to you straight.

From Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto:

Excessive government spending has done more than just put us in debt.  Charles Murray offers us a useful thought experiment that illustrates the welfare state’s enervating effects on our communities and our character.  Imagine that all the programs that constituted the federal “safety net” were all of a sudden abolished, and for whatever reason could not be revived.  And pretend also that the states chose not to replace them with programs of their own, which they almost certainly would.  The questions Murray wants us to focus on are these: How would you respond?  Would you be more or less likely to volunteer at a food bank?  Would you be more or less likely to volunteer at a literacy center?  If you were a lawyer or physician, would you be more or less likely to offer pro bono services?

We would all answer yes to these questions, wouldn’t we?  But then we need to ask ourselves: why aren’t we doing these things already?  And the answer is that we have bought into the soul-killing logic of the welfare state: somebody else is doing it for me.  I don’t need to give of myself, since a few scribbles on a tax form fulfill my responsibility toward my fellow man.  Do our responsibilities as human beings really extend no farther than this?

My wife and I have been recently reading together through Theirs Is The Kingdom: Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America by Robert D. Lupton.  The book is a collection of short essays reflecting on the author’s experiences living in urban Atlanta.  Rather than being heavy-handed and guilt-inducing, the book strives to simply cause the reader to question some of their preconceived notions about the poor, and urban culture in America.

Here is a lengthy, but good, section from the chapter entitled, When Winning Is Losing:

My competitiveness reached its peak one day in my twenty-sixth year.  I was flying door-gunner on a helicopter in Vietnam, and we were on a search-and-destroy mission.  Suddenly the ground beneath us came alive with enemy fire.  The intense battle that followed demanded the ultimate in combat strategy, skill, and commitment.  The stakes were never higher and victory was never more exhilarating.  I accepted with pride a medal for heroism in aerial combat.

It was only later, while still in Vietnam, that I began to understand the implications of my competitiveness.  As I flew back from another “successful” mission, I realized that the emotions I experienced were the same I once felt while wrestling or debating.  They were more intense because the stakes were higher, but they were unmistakably the same emotions.  I was taking human life and feeling the thrill of victory.  This thrill was inversely proportional to the agony of defeat — in this case death and maiming.

I began to suspect there was something wrong with a system in which my winning was built upon the defeat of another human being.  When I returned to the United States I was unable to put this new insight behind me.  I began working with disadvantaged people who were losers in a competitive economy.  I saw young men, broken men, crippled by too many years of defeat…And although I felt unpatriotic for thinking such thoughts, I wondered if all was well with an economic system where winning meant defeating another human being.  Could it be that among human beings cooperation was a better way than competition?

I pray that one day God will bring in a new order in which human beings will rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.  Perhaps on that day we will refuse the gains made at the expense of others and our success will be measured by the quality of our servanthood to humanity.

We’ve all heard that bad company corrupts our good character - that is, the company we keep affects we who are and how we act. I think this is true, although certainly not an excuse to avoid spending time with sinners (as Jesus taught us by example).

Today though, I’ve been thinking about how “bad culture” can affect our good character. For example, if we willingly surround ourselves by the culture and thinking of the world, then perhaps that will rub off on us. This is hard for me because I find the closed-mindedness and “circle-the-wagons” mentality of Christians frustrating. This frustration, in turn, leads me to venture deeper into the thinking of the world then perhaps many of my brothers and sisters in Christ dare go. Is this dangerous or bad for me? Sometimes I think it is…but I’m still trying to figure it out.

A good example of this is music. I like to think that the music I listen to doesn’t affect me, but maybe I’m just being arrogant and haughty while in reality surrounding myself with music and lyrics that prominently display and idolize evil is bad for me? How far does my Christian liberty extend?

The way Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing abstract. noting impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular, local.The ways employed by our North American culture are conspicuously impersonal: programs, organizations, techniques. general guidelines, information detached from place. In matters of ways and means, the vocabulary of numbers is preferred over names, ideologies crowd out ideas, the gray fog of abstraction absorbs the sharp particularities of the recognizable face on the familiar street.

My concern is provoked by the observation that so many who understand themselves to be followers of Jesus, without hesitation, and apparently without thinking, embrace the ways and means of the culture as they go about their daily living “in Jesus’ name.”

-Eugene Peterson in The Jesus Way:a conversation on the ways that Jesus is the way

Sometimes, following God’s will for our lives can be a difficult thing to do. I’m not even entirely sure what the phrase “God’s will” means in context of talking about one’s life. I’m not convinced that when presented with an array of choices, one is “God’s will” and the others are not. Rather, I guess being a good Presbyterian I remain committed to the idea that God knows what choice we will make before we will make it, but the choosing is still our own.

Practically I suppose this means that we have the freedom to make choices in life without agonizing over the question of whether it is God’s will for us or not. Certainly we should seek wisdom and counsel in decision making, but sometimes it’s good to move beyond fear and embrace our freedom in Christ to “just do it.”

More on this later - lots going on in my own life right now preventing me from posting more regularly, but expect some updates later this week.

Here is a passage from Are Christians Human on what happens when we try to go truer then true:

There is a distortion, an imbalance which, while claiming to stress what is good, results in a fatal disturbance of the truth. Some thing is emphasized in such a way as to deny other things that are true, in the process it ceases to be true. For when truth is exaggerated, it does not become some kind of super truth… What happens is that exaggerated truth becomes sub-truth, and sub-truth is falsehood.

So a distorted, exaggerated notion of faith leads to a denial of reason, an exaggerated idea of divine guidance distorts our understanding of Christian responsibility, an over emphasis on self-control effectively denies that man is an emotional creature, a naive concept of providence can so stress God’s care for the Christian as to lead him to expect to be lifted right out of the real world.”

-Nigel Cameron in Are Christians Human?

In this case, the metaphor of ‘bending the card the other way’ is not applicable. We must not compensate for or previous errors by going beyond the truth, but must always aim for the exact mark.

The two terms, ’spiritual’ and ‘theology’, keep good company with one another. ‘Theology” is the attention that we give to God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures and in Jesus Christ. ‘Spiritual’ is the insistence that everything that God reveals of himself and his works is capable of being lived by ordinary men and women in their homes and work places. ‘Spiritual’ keeps ‘theology’ from degenerating onto merely thinking and talking and writing about God at a distance. ‘Theology’ keeps ’spiritual’ from becoming merely thinking and talking and writing about the feelings and thoughts one has about God. The two terms need each other, for we know how easy it is to let our study of God (theology) get separated from the way we live; we also know how easy it is to let our desires to live whole and satisfying lives (spiritual lives) get disconnected from who God actually is and the ways he works among us.”

-Eugene Peterson from the Introduction to Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

I read an interesting interview the other day with a Portland, OR couple who have refused to pay that portion of their taxes every year which were being used to support wars they disagreed with. Rather than simply using this as an excuse to not pay any taxes at all, the couple has written a check to their local government every year covering the amount they have refused to pay to the national government. Of course, as you can imagine, Uncle Sam is not a big fan and has pursued these uncollected taxes rather vigorously.

This is pretty radical to think about for your average American. All good, law-abiding citizens pay taxes, and avoiding doing so seems somehow dirty or wrong. I can’t help but feel like this couple is doing a moral thing, however. They are paying exactly the same amount in taxes as the government says they should, they are simply refusing their money to be allocated towards that which they feel is immoral.

Christians should stand up for what is right, and good, and honoring to God. We should also not allow our allegiance to worldly institutions to supersede our allegiance to Christ. According to Christ’s commands, we should follow the rules of, and pray for, our government. These things being said, there is a clearly a point at which “rendering unto Caesar” crashes headlong into “honoring Christ“, and our commitment as Christians to that which is good and pleasing to God must always win.

For example, if the government were to designate a portion of your tax dollars towards subsidizing the cost of abortions in America (thus increasing the rate of abortions for convenience sake alone), and you felt that abortion was a morally unacceptable thing for a Christian to financially support, then surely you would be justified in not helping fund such an endeavor by voluntarily withholding, and redirecting, your tax contribution towards abortion subsidies.

By the same logic then, if a Christian were convinced that tax-payer funded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were morally unacceptable things for followers of Christ to support, then would they not be justified in following a course of action similar to that of this couple from Oregon? Do we ever allow our allegiance to our government and unwillingness to experience social (or legal) pressure prevent us from following Christ radically?