As you may have noticed, the website has not been updated since late April. We would have liked to have notified you sooner, but the project’s status was only decided within the last few weeks. Suspension is a step before shutting down. We hope that we might raise money to continue, but in this economic climate, this appears unlikely. If nothing changes, the site will be taken down by September.

Apart from the financial aspect, the project has been very successful in achieving its aims. Gospelandculture.org has had almost 60,000 page views from 18,000 visitors from 127 countries in just five months, all by word of mouth. More than 800 sites reposted our content. We gained media attention from denominational publications and newspapers at Christian colleges. Our Forays were well attended.

In the end, it all came down to money. We launched this phase of the GCP in July 2008. At that time we anticipated significant donor financing in the short term. Our plan had been to use donor money to seed the project, then eventually have it become largely self-sufficient. When the economic crisis hit in September 2008, donor financing disappeared.

The vision that empowered the project continues to thrive. It became apparent to us that an organization like the GCP could not survive independently. While it appears likely that the GCP will not continue in its present form, a number of us are seeking ways to continue its work in partnership with other organizations and institutions.

We’re very proud of what the Lord has done through the GCP, and especially through gospelandculture.org. The GCP was borne out of a desire to re-introduce Christians to the fact that the Gospel is not some narrow formula for how to be saved. We’ve demonstrated in a host of ways how the Gospel reframes and illuminates key contemporary issues. Through the articles posted here, through our Forays and many other events, we have shown that empowering believers to apply their faith in specific, skilled ways can bring significant, Christ-glorifying change to our world.

We are grateful for all the interest so many of you have shown through attending the Forays, and through your comments and other ways of participating in the website. We would appreciate your prayers as we seek to pay off our remaining debts and as we contemplate our future. May we all glorify him until he returns.

Word meets World helps you develop an understanding of core biblical principles and models how to apply your faith to life issues. This seminar will help you become grounded in what the Bible teaches about

•    How media and popular culture affect us
•    The role of the heart, mind and senses in engaging the world
•    Foundational principles for understanding our relationship to the world
•    Sacred vs. Profane/Common Grace vs. the Antithesis and other important issues

William Edgar is Professor of Apologetics, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. Chris Simmons is Executive Director of The Gospel & Culture Project.

Friday, May 8th, 7–9:45pm; Saturday, May 9th, 9:30–12:30pm

Cost: $40 per person / $20 per full-time student

Location: Philadelphia Mennonite High School, 860 North 24th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19130

To Register and/or request additional information: email your name and phone number to wmw@gospelandculture.org. Send Email

Greg Mottola’s new film, Adventureland, adds to this tradition of art about transitions. Regrettably, a misleading marketing campaign over-emphasizes the ribald guy humor in this gem of a little movie. In actuality, Mottota’s bittersweet coming of age story occupies an aesthetic space closer to The Graduate or Breaking Away than Porky’s or American Pie. It is a funny, honest, and occasionally heart-wrenching portrayal of the plight that all young adults must face. Rudderless, they still must navigate the ephemeral border between adolescence and maturity.

The year is 1987. James (Jesse Eisenberg)—a brainy, middle-class kid from Pittsburgh—unexpectedly finds himself in need of a summer job. Because of their own financial difficulties, his parents retract their college graduation promise of a trip to Europe. Abandoned stateside by his wealthy college buddy, the liberally educated James must now scrimp and save every cent if he has any hope of affording graduate school at Columbia in the fall. He learns the hard way that his expensive college degree in comparative literature and Renaissance studies leaves him unqualified for, well, everything.

Bereft of options, James gamely takes a menial job at a local amusement park called Adventureland, a cross between a rundown Six Flags and the third layer of hell. The park consists of rigged games, dangerous rides, and an ample supply of oddball characters. Eccentric co-workers include married park managers Bobby and Paulette (Saturday Night Live vets Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig); the wise, Gogol-reading, pipe-smoking Joel (Martin Starr); and the terminally moody Em (Kristen Steward), a girl recklessly searching for intimacy after the loss of her mother to cancer.

Director and screenwriter Mottola gently guides his characters toward subtle and understated performances. Fulfilling the promise shown in a few years back in The Squid and the Whale. Eisenberg’s James is likeable, sincere and utterly clueless in the ways of romance. When the girl of his dreams, Em, puts the brakes on their summer courtship, James foolishly risks this fledgling love to pursue Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), the shallow disco queen of the park. He’s such a well-meaning romantic idiot, you want to shake him and hug him for his hapless choices.

Following up her role in the mega-hit Twilight, Steward’s Em helps us understand what all of the fuss is about. Her piercing stare radiates beauty, integrity and mystery. When one of her friends decides not to date the lovably nerdy Joel because of his Jewish heritage, Em publically rebukes and disowns her. But Em has secrets of her own that may prove even more embarrassing and destructive.

Much of the charm of Adventureland lies in the authentic way it captures the Zeitgeist of the late 1980s. For those of us who came of age in Reagan era America, the film offers a nostalgic romp. In addition to hair-spray-soaked mullets and preppy Izod shirts, an inspired mixture of 1980s pop music delightfully scores the film. Obnoxious dance tunes such as Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” endlessly blare from the park’s tilt-o-whirl ride. More substantive melodies by iconic artists such as Lou Reed and The Cure serendipitously resonate from car radios and mixed tapes.

Viewers should be warned that Adventureland does contain scenes of recreational drug use, as well as a share of vulgar humor. Personally, I found the repeated and numbing use of marijuana disturbing. But, as a recovering male adolescent, I confess that most of the humor in the film rings hysterically and embarrassingly true. The minor character of Frigo (Matt Bush) earns the most laughs. He’s that guy you might remember from high school or college—the one who pathologically makes the grossest comments at the worst times, and who can never resist the temptation to repeatedly punch his closest friends in the privates. Yes, I winced at Frigo’s awkwardness. I also laughed out loud.

And please understand, drug use and adolescent humor do not define Adventureland. These base activities only accentuate deeper themes. As we awkwardly traipse through the transitions of our lives, Adventureland poignantly reminds that we all share a need for love, the yearning for direction, the craving for community, and the desire to make our lives mean something.

We may not always agree with the choices that James and Em make in their journey, but we share in their longings.

Robert Hubbard is Associate Professor of Theater and Speech at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa.

The book seeks to unmask various un-Christian ways of thinking about hope. The facts that Jesus was raised from the dead and that our hope is to be made like him mean, in Wright’s analysis, that we have to reject the vague, disembodied hopes that tend to dominate our piety. In the resurrection, God has conquered death and decay. He is making all things new. As Wright and many other theologians argue and have argued, God is transforming the earth itself. As a result, we hope not to be spirited off to heaven, but for God’s victory to be made finally concrete in our lives and on this earth.

Wright seeks to convince his reader that Christian hope is not about going to heaven. Instead, Christian hope is about new creation. Wright wants us to claim God’s promise that death is an enemy that has been conquered. He rejects all sentimentalizing of death, all misguided attempts to suggest that death is a good thing, and he paints, instead, a biblical portrait in which death is what is—a dark and dreadful foe. Death is contrary to what God wants. Christian hope lies, not in embracing death, but in embracing God’s victory over death.

Jesus’ resurrection means both material creation in general and human bodies in particular are included in God’s plan for redemption. Christian hope lies, not in dreams of escape from the body, but in the promise that the body is being and will be redeemed. At every point, Wright highlights the physicality and materiality of the resurrection. The resurrected Jesus is the model for Christian hope for our own bodies. He has been transformed. Some people don’t recognize him.

He moved through locked doors. Yet, this same resurrected Jesus is also clearly physical. He eats fish. He shows his wounds. Wright argues that the gospel witness to Jesus’ resurrection body is “without precedent.”¹ He provides suggestions about the ascension, heaven, and hell that will provoke much thought and discussion. His readers are challenged to allow future hope to become present hope. They are further challenged to allow that present hope to shape their daily, material, physical lives in vibrant ways.

To quote from Wright:  “A good many Easter hymns start by assuming that the point of Easter is that it proves the existence of life after death and encourage us to hope for it. This is regularly, but ironically, combined with a view of that life after death in which the specific element of resurrection has been quietly removed.”² Wright pleads that we take resurrection hope seriously. It is not heaven only but the renewal and transformation of bodies and of earth that is promised in Jesus’ victory over death. “Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now.”³ He insists that hope for a better world is integral to a gospel that hinges on the resurrection. He draws the conclusion that our work in this world is thus of inestimable value.

Wright’s work sounds a practical call to Christians. We should live the resurrection. The book aims to show Christians that the biblical witness about the resurrection focuses on bodies. Wright helped my students to have their hope shaped by the resurrection. Many moved from hoping for their souls to go to heaven to hoping for their whole selves, body and soul, to be redeemed. They moved from accepting death to rejoicing in God’s victory over it. They moved from thinking of the body as an impediment to spirituality to thinking of the ways their bodies might be used to glorify God.

In reflecting on the resurrection, these students made all kinds of connections between Jesus’ victory over sin and death and their own bodily lives. Through reading Wright, they were able to catch sight of a vision for living in hope. I asked them, “how can we live our faith in the resurrection?”  They answered:

Plant trees
Visit the imprisoned
Have babies
Work for justice
Bake good things
Actively practice the Sabbath
Paint, draw, write, sing
Feed the hungry
Love beauty
Live as physical witnesses in the world that God is victor over death

I asked them, “what would you have thought at the beginning of this class if I had given you this list of ways to practice resurrection faith?” They laughed back at me, and agreed that the list would have seemed nonsensical had Wright not pressed them to think about the ways scripture testifies to God’s resurrection power. Planting trees and baking good things reflect the belief that God redeems space. Working for justice in the material world comes from the confidence that God is redeeming that world, that he cares about it and loves it.

In John Wesley’s sermon, “The More Excellent Way,” he spends most of his time asking folks to think about the ways the most ordinary, mundane aspects of their lives can be offered up to God. He wants his audience to think about how they sleep and how they eat. He wants them to evaluate their little daily habits, the things that entertain them. Wright’s focus on the way resurrection faith claims our bodies makes sense alongside Wesley’s very everyday concerns. Ordinary, daily, physical life is part of the glory of God.

Likewise, we should truly celebrate Easter. Wright calls us to pop the champagne corks, to shout to the sky. In our feasting, we taste the feast to come. In our singing, we hear the eternal songs of glory. He wants to challenge us to think imaginatively and faithfully about how to do this. I confess, I find the challenge…well, challenging. In my home and church this Easter, there was singing and feasting. There were painted eggs and an extravagant cake requested by my preschooler. There was chocolate and other good things. In church, Charles Wesley’s jubilant hymn was sung:

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!

However, Wright makes me long for even more celebration. Wilder exultation. Ferocious joy. Unbridled ways of celebrating what God has done. My students have helped me to see what that might look like. I’m grateful to them. I’m also eager for my brothers and sisters in Christ to show me even more.

__________
¹ N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 55.
² Ibid., 190.
³ 191.

Beth Felker Jones is Assistant Professor of Theology at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.

Image - Chrishna

Ecology is the study of our home, our place. Developing an ethic of care for our place makes sense whether the ‘place’ is our immediate residence or the broader creation. It is unwise to degrade one’s home, to ignore holes in its roof or cracks in its foundation. Failure to care for our homes results in deterioration of our personal well being. When we live in a home for a long time we begin developing affection for it. Homes are more than houses; they become places where cherished interactions and nurture occur.

When they work well, homes are places we love to be, and in fact, places we love. But is the creation something we should love? Christians embrace the calling to love God, but are often uncomfortable with the idea of loving what God has made. Yet, scriptures are clear that God himself loves the creation deeply. In fact, he offered his son because he so deeply loved his ‘cosmos’ (John 3:16). Christ came partly because of God’s desire to heal the collective brokenness of his creation (Col. 3:15–20). If this is the God whose image we bear, how should our love and affection for our home take root?

Love is both an emotion and a commitment that produces altered behavior. One does not love a spouse, an aging parent, a child, or even a home without living in a way that reflects this love. Love requires setting aside self-interest for the sake of the beloved, a response that is not only undertaken when convenient or fiscally advantageous. Developing such a love toward the creation is not only appropriate, but fundamental to Christian faith.  Furthermore, working to reorient our lives in a more sustainable way is one means through which this love can be expressed.

So why is the Christian community in North America hesitant to take up this challenge? Below we list five major reasons for this hesitancy and counter each with a response.

A.  Since human souls are the primary focus of God’s redemption plan, creation care is a distraction that has no ultimate importance.

This hesitancy creates a false dichotomy between the responsibilities of serving our fellow human beings (Gal. 5:13) and serving the creation (Gen. 2:15). Serving Christ means we are called to follow his example. He came to earth to give up himself so that all things could be redeemed (Col. 1:20). The entire picture is distorted, the entire picture demands our attention, and the entire picture will be redeemed. This is the work God calls us to–a comprehensive type of evangelism, as recorded in Mark 16:15, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.”

This is also a false dichotomy because of how intertwined the welfare of creation and the welfare of human beings are. If we pollute the stream in our neighborhood, the fish in that stream will be adversely affected, but so will our neighbors who live downstream. Continuing our contributions to global climate change will detract from the well being of both human and non-human life. God’s work in Christ is cosmic work. His promise of peace is our cosmic hope. When we allow God to use us to promote his coming shalom, we will find ourselves not only directly tending to the needs of other humans, but also working to bring healing to the earth. Therefore, riding bicycles and recycling, composting and planting trees are not simply trendy activities, they can be hope-filled illustrations of his coming kingdom.¹

B.  Creation care is unnecessary because the creation will be destroyed when Christ returns.

This idea raises two key questions. First, where will the resurrected lives of Christians be lived after they die? And second, is there a future for the earth itself after the full realization of Christ’s kingdom? Much rests on interpretations of key biblical texts such as II Peter 3:10, where common interpretations have proclaimed that “the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.” Rather than destruction, these passages and others point to a refining fire that transforms cultural goods, and people, into what they were meant to be in the first place.

The prophet Isaiah paints prophetic landscapes portraying wolves lying down with lambs, children leading parades with calves and lions, foreign ships sailing into the holy city with the wealth of the nations, and swords transformed into plowshares. These images proclaim that our redeemed lives will be lived on earth, with these cultural goods, refined and yet recognizable, and that there will be continuity between our current and future existence. A careful re-reading of key texts reveals this notion of earth-keeping being unnecessary as a deeply regrettable misinterpretation of scripture. Care for creation in the present is a way of testifying to the truth of God’s promise to respond to the non-human creation’s groaning, just as he will respond to the groaning of his people.

C. It won’t make a difference: what will happen will happen regardless of how we respond or live out our lives.

The problem with ecological fatalism is that it fails to believe what the bible tells us about hope. Ironically, the idolatry that is often misappropriated to those who promote creation care is better recognized as an idolatry of those who espouse a kind of “realism” that denies the hope of the gospel. In his book Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright provides a contemporary rationale for the hope of the gospel. Wright argues that most Christians are woefully unaware of the actual hope scripture describes. This ignorance has resulted in at least two very popular (and very false) ideas about heaven as a disembodied place: one in which everyone finds their way to a personalized syncretistic, universalist heaven, and another that allows for only the most holy to enter, and banishes all others to a comic-strip version of a fire-and-brimstone hell.

Wright presents a much larger (and more physical) hope by articulating a wonderful, deeply biblical vision. Among other texts, Wright cites the poetry of Isaiah 54 as a promise from a loving Father to his children. Acknowledging human pain, homelessness, and the deepest longing to truly flourish, God paints picture after picture of a world made new. We read about barren women giving birth to many children, people without shelter enlarging their tents, and the permanence of his steadfast love to his people. Steven Bouma-Prediger writes, “In a world of wounds, there is hope amid hopelessness, for our Redeemer is the Creator–a God of unsearchable compassion and unquenchable love.”² If we believe God’s promises are true, we will continue to hope for his creation.

D. Things aren’t nearly as bad as the environmentalists claim. Human beings are resilient and will ‘adapt’ to any changes that arise.

This perspective calls into question the legitimacy of science as a means for understanding reality. However, when science is done carefully, reviewed and confirmed, its findings are foolish to ignore (When the diagnosis is cancer, we consider it unwise to discredit the oncologist in favor of treatment advice from a mechanic). Within the scientific community today there is clear consensus that our current collective, global way of life is not sustainable.³ Science does not tell us why or even that we should change our behavior, but it certainly illuminates what conditions are like now and what they will be like in the future if we continue with our current unsustainable ways of living.⁴

With regard to climate change, it is foolish to ignore scientists or to think the effects will only be environmental. Climate change will intensify inequalities between nations. It will erode financial and political security and foment social unrest.⁵ While the impact on ecological integrity is already being recorded, it is naïve to propose that human beings will somehow be able to ‘adapt’ and escape being adversely affected.

E. God would never let things get as bad as predicted. We just need to continue to trust him and he will take care of us.

This type of response is useful to absolve ourselves of any wrongdoing. It promotes a convenient 911 type of a God who is ready to save us from disaster regardless of how much we mess things up. Scripture does not support this fallacy. We are given directives for how God desires us to live out our days. The bible is replete with examples of God’s disappointment and righteous vindication when the expectations he has set are not lived out. God really does care about how we live our lives.

Neither does the bible support the notion that God will swoop in to rescue a people who are reaping what they have sown. Humanity has been created with free will and is expected to act responsibly and compassionately.⁶ If we make bad choices–self-serving choices that do not reflect a Christ-like servanthood for the rest of creation (Phil. 2:5–8), justice will come down (Is. 5:8, Ez. 34, Rev. 11:18). While Christ’s sacrificial gift is the ultimate rescue package, in the mean time God’s vision for shalomic justice is one He expects us to take seriously and fervently practice. Since planetary health is being threatened by our misguided and self-motivated actions, our response should be one of repentance and restoration.

The secular world has found great motivation for taking care of our home here on earth. Much of this motivation stems from considering the rights of future generations, the rights of other species, recognizing the connections between caring for creation and improving human life, and desiring to preserve beauty. Christians have all these motivations to stimulate a response, plus more.

We believe the world is deeply loved by God, a love we are called to emulate. Creation is not ours to do with as we please. It belongs to God (Psalm 24:1). He has entrusted us to steward it wisely, use it responsibly and preserve the conditions necessary for all its inhabitants to flourish.⁷ Redefining our lives so that instead of eroding, we help insure the sustainability of the creation, demonstrates our reverence and deep love both for the Creator, and for what he has made.

_________
¹ Steven Bouma-Prediger, For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001).
² Ibid.
³ Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, Sara Schley, Joe Laur and Nina Kruschwitz, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
⁴ Susan Solomon, Gian-Caspar Plattner, Reto Knutti, and Pierre Friedlingstein, “Irreversible climate change because of carbon dioxide emissions,” pnas.org, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0812721106. <12.10.08>
⁵ Lester Brown, Plan 3.0 (New York: Earth Policy Institute and W. W. Norton, 2008); The Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
⁶ Nicholas Wolterstorff, Educating for Responsible Action (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980).
⁷ David Warners and Larry Borst, “The good of a flourishing creation: seeking God in a culture of affluence,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol. 57 No. 1, pp 24-33, 2005.

David Warners is a Professor of Biology and Jeff Bouman is Director of Service Learning at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

To give you a feel for it, I’ve decided to write this entire article using only messages under 140 characters. Of course, on a real Twitter page, you’d be reading my tweets from the bottom of the page to the top, so it’s a bit of a compromise.

Twitter’s rise has been meteoric. Btw 2/08-2/09, US use grew 1382%, 1689% in UK.¹

Still smaller than Facebook, Twitter is catching up. By 2010 it could have 50+ mil users or more.²

Twitter’s attraction? Hyper-connectivity: that feeling of intimacy, community and immediacy. Listen to other’s thoughts in real time.

Micro-blogging is an easy target, but it’s not as ridiculous as it first appears.

Twitter has been extremely useful in crisis situations. Got Cal-Berkeley student and translator out of Egyptian jail.³

Helped coordinate relief and give real-time updates during Mumbai bombings. Wked so well govt asked them 2 stop bc terrorist might Twitter.⁴

People have used Twitter to find biz contacts, friends, jobs, customer support, etc.

Twitter’s been helpful 2 me personally. Connected w/a friend in States who’d lost her best friend in car accident.

W/o Twitter, I wouldn’t have known and couldn’t have encouraged or prayed for her.

Coolest feature: the Everyone tab. Click on it and you get tweets from random people all over the world who posted just then.

Gives weird feeling of mixed omniscience + intimacy w/ strangers, like angels in Wim Wender’s Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire).

It gives the impression that they aren’t really strangers, but rather potential friends waiting to be discovered.

Net effect (pun alert): Twitter lowers social barriers, and so works to fulfill human need for community, for contact, for being heard.

Prob w/ease of soc. access: relationships are 2 easy. U don’t have 2 spend time cultivating ‘em. Instant relationship not nec a good thing.

Real friends require face2face conversations, shared meals, glasses of wine, cups of coffee. Tweeting can thin the quality of relationships.

Plus, keeping conversations to 140 character byte-sized chunks does weird things to communication, as u can see. Squooshes it.

Some have satirized the communication style. My two faves . . .

Homer’s Odyssey: “Circe is hot. All my bros turned into pigs. LULZ!”⁵

Shakespeare: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Nah.”⁶

Graver danger: *narcissism:* Everything geared to answering one question: “What are you doing?” Company motto.⁷ Self-display encouraged.

Twitter culture, or the “Twittersphere,” is geared towards trying to get more “followers”=people who read your self-display thru tweets.

U do this by offering “value” in ur tweets, e.g. tech. info, news stories, wisdom n wit, humor, helpful links, etc.

Do it well and watch ur numbers soar. I don’t do it well. I’m a noob.

The people who do it best are called “Twitterati,” the power-user lords of Twitter, like iJustine, Scobleizer, and garyvee.

Others not so worried re: numbers. Just want to connect, be heard, like prayer. Want 2 know some1 cares about the details of their lives.

Most fall somewhere between the 2 groups: prayer + value-added exchange.

Prob. is that u come to see followers as a reflection of self-worth. Boost in numbers=ego boost. Fall in numbers=ego hit.

Everybody on Twitter feels a little like a mini-celebrity. This is not a good thing.

Celebrity and instant friendship do weird things to self-image/psyche/spirit. It gives a buzz.

Putting self on display comes 2 feel like an obligation: I owe it to the tweeple.

But why shud I compare myself w/“Socks the Cat.” He’s got 300k+ followers (including me). I’ve only got 14.

Feels like I’m striving for the wrong target.  Must . . . resist . . .

Is it a consumer-oriented marketing culture gone to seed? Is it sharing with a caring community? Maybe both?

Whatever it is, it feeds the need for affirmation and draws me in for more. Must be vry careful.

1 thing that helps is 2 remember: Good Friday + Easter means I’ve got more than enough affirmation.

One of the side-effects of the gospel: the worthless declared worthy in God’s sight. I’ve been adopted into an awesome network.

Twitter “prayer” focuses on self-display. Real prayer focuses on God. Narcissism vs. trust. No contest.

Massive affirmation in Christ (some1 cares about details of my life) means I can affirm others who are lonely. Sharing out of fullness.

1 Pet. 2:9-10, 2 Cor. 1:3-7: The original intention of social networking. God’s glory and mutual comfort/encouragement.

That kind of networking goes on forever. Not limited to 140 characters.

Gospel side-effect #2: a community of screwed-up people like me drawn together, pursuing a single love. Folks to drink a glass of wine with.

If Church were what it’s supposed 2 be, it wud be natural for the lonely 2 come in n find peace. Make Twitter obsolete? Less needed, anyway.

Concl: Twitter is interesting, useful, and tempts w/its own idols. Go in with eyes/ears wide open.

Trust God, serve and share self w/others, don’t get swallowed by pride and marketing monster.

Puts a whole new spin on being a “follower” of Christ.  Thank God Christ follows back.

KTHXBAI!

_________
¹ See Adam Ostrow, “Twitter Now Growing at a Staggering 1,382%,”at Mashable.com (3.16.2009), available online at http://mashable.com/2009/03/16/twitter-growth-rate-versus-facebook/ (3.26.2009); and Dan Whitworth, “Twitter Growth Explodes in a Year,” BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat website (3.17. 2009), available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_7948000/7948092.stm (3.26.2009).  Real tweets don’t have footnotes. Instead they embed urls into the post.  I decided that would clutter things too much. Another compromise.
² Nick O’Neill, “Twitter Has a Big Month, Grows to Over 8 Million U.S. Users,” Socialtimes.com (3.6.2009), available online at http://www.socialtimes.com/2009/03/twitter-us-growth/ (3.26.2009).
³ Mallory Simon, “Student ‘Twitters’ His Way Out of Egyptian Jail,” CNN.com (3.25.2008), at http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/25/twitter.buck/index.html (3.28.2009); and Simon, “Twitter Saga Ends in Jailed Translator Going Free,” CNN.com (7.10.2008), at http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/10/maree.freed/index.html (3.28.2009).
⁴ Stephanie Busari, “Tweeting the Terror: How Social Media Reacted to Mumbai,” CNN.com (11.28.2008), at http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/11/27/mumbai.twitter/index.html (3.28.2009).
⁵ Eric Alt, “If Homer’s Odyssey Was Written on Twitter,” on Holy Taco website, at http://www.holytaco.com/if-homers-odyssey-was-written-twitter (4.10.2009).
⁶ Anna at abdpbt blog, at http://www.abdpbt.com/2008/12/08/10-tweets-you-might-see-if-shakespeare-used-twitter/ (4.10.2009).
⁷ See the Twitter welcome page, http://twitter.com.

Ted Turnau teaches at Anglo-American University and at The Centre for Media Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.

The WPA (Works Progress Administration) was a monumental government endeavor during one of the most dismal periods in American history–the Great Depression. Its main goal was to use the gifts of nearly nine million unemployed people to aid in the preservation and development of American culture.²

During the Depression, one section of the WPA was assigned the task of documenting “group eating as an important social institution” and describing the “authentic art” of “American cookery” in the face of “mass production of foodstuff and partly cooked foods and introduction of numerous technological devices that lessen labor of preparation but lower quality of the product.”³ Amen.

The results of this assignment were never published. Willard found the resulting collection of materials in the Library of Congress. She selected writings from various categories then crisscrossed America in her car to see which events were still in existence and to see how subsequent generations understood them.

The Depression-era accounts in America Eats! contrast sharply with the increasingly isolated nature of contemporary lifestyles, where many of us look at a screen many more hours a day than we do another human face. Shifts like this spur the anxiety, panic and doom that these difficult times can motivate. Not surprisingly, we are seeing signs of an increasing desire to live life unplugged from the maddening assault of electronics. Likewise, in the realm of cooking, many are turning from processed or semi-prepared food to the Slow Food movement and the heralding of simple pleasures, such as The Whoopie Pie.⁴ These are the kinds of pleasures that America Eats! celebrates.

The book eloquently teaches us how people once used food to welcome strangers to their communities, help neighbors find work, and provide ways for the poorest in their communities to receive nourishment, with dignity, alongside the wealthiest. It brings readers into a simpler time when farm families lent a hand to neighbors on threshing day, with their only payment being a feast prepared by the grateful family that received the benefits of their hard labor.

These food gatherings illustrate the role that food played as the salad bowl of cultures that comprise the United States created networks of community support and social interdependence. They also show the ways in which breaking bread functioned as a vehicle for achieving community.

The variety of the writers and the forms in which they wrote make reading the original accounts feel fresh and varied. Some are simple lists of the menus and attendees of a gathering. Others take the form of short stories, where we can dress ourselves in the time period, smelling and tasting the culinary delights and experiencing the pain and joy of everyday life during the Depression. They are as diverse as a booya picnic in Minnesota, a pig foot supper in Virginia, a political barbecue in Mississippi, chuck wagon suppers in Texas, the funeral cry feast of the Choctaw Indians in Oklahoma and wild game dinners in Oregon.

Many of the accounts do not have an idyllic tone or setting. To Willard’s credit, she does not clean up the racial slurs or political incorrectness in the original writings, allowing them to provide crisper views of life in a nation more blatantly divided by racial and class barriers.

These food-related gatherings and events show us how deeply the social fabric of our United States has changed. We vicariously peer into the life of African-American families that attended the Big Quarterly in Wilmington, Delaware. The event preserved the feasting and, more importantly, the gathering of this community. The Quarterly began in the early 1800s when it was the “custom of slave owners in Delaware and nearby states to allow slaves to have a day of freedom quarterly to worship or do as they pleased, and many slaves were provided with carts and ox teams to make the trip to a common gathering place.”⁵

Willard describes the disconnect that has increased as the years have passed since the heyday of the Big Quarterly. Even within the African-American community, there have been factions that have sought to dissolve the Quarterly. Police and city officials in the 1960s accused the Quarterly of being a stronghold of the Black Power movement. Willard quotes a local clergy, Bishop Jarman, speaking about the August Quarterly (as it is now known), “You can tell what a culture’s values are when you look at their celebrations and the August Quarterly was the foundation of the building of our culture. We remember how our forebears not only persevered, but made the best of a worse situation than any of us will know.”⁶

An account from Nebraska describes a Fun Feed as “merely events of hilarity for local people who bring a covered dish or two into a local meeting place and listen to take-offs and stunts. There is very little seriousness injected into the program…” Another account says of the Fun Feed, “Into the towns the country people come. They bring their food. The ‘covered dish’ is plentiful. No one goes home hungry.”⁷

As she did her modern-day searching, Willard hoped to find Fun Feeds still going strong. Although, she was not able to find contemporary events that paralleled them, she reflected on their pertinence to our current situation. She writes that it was

an event where all kinds of people in a community, people who wouldn’t in general have much social interaction with one another, got together to amuse themselves for the simple reason that there was nothing else to do. That, and they were all in the same boat, in regard to a situation such as the Depression, and thus the corollary need for a few laughs to muddle through.⁸

America Eats! also inspires us to remember the sensory pleasures of baking one’s own bread, canning jams of sweet summer berries or corn fresh from the cob. The descriptions of preparing animals and fowl on a farm (or from one’s one backyard), reestablish the origins of that steak or chicken breast we are accustomed to selecting from a plastic-wrapped Styrofoam tray in a cooled case in the supermarket. Being reminded of the origins of our foods should make us more aware of what we put in our mouths, how we nourish our families and friends, and the agriculture industry and local farms that support our national food supply.

We can’t always control the forces that affect our retirement plans, investments or even job security, but we can plant a garden (on a windowsill or a corner of a yard) whose harvest we can share with our families, neighborhoods, and communities. Even the new family in the White House has planted one!⁹ Whether through growing or raising our own food, or thinking creatively about the basic staples we get at the local mega-market, we can model the Lord’s table through our preparations and our gatherings.

Let’s set an example to our neighbors and welcome them to share our “bounty” in the spirit of America Eats! May we respond to our common struggles with mutual support and community in these times that surely demand a Samaritan’s heart.

________
¹ Pat Willard, America Eats! (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).
² Ibid., 3.
³ Ibid., 4.
⁴ Micheline Maynard, “Whoopie! Cookie, Pie or Cake, It’s Having Its Moment,” nytimes.com, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/dining/18whoop.html?_r=1&ref=dining. <3.24.2009>
⁵ Willard, America Eats, 158.
⁶ Ibid., 162.
⁷ Ibid., 210–211.
⁸ Ibid., 211.
⁹ Marian Burros, “Obamas to Plant Vegetable Garden at White House,” nytimes.com, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/dining/20garden.html?sq=white%20house%20garden&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=2&adxnnlx=1237910691-Y1JAW3rmSPuZuMi2II34UQ. <3.24.2009>

Jean Simmons directs marketing, web layout and culinary services for The Gospel & Culture Project.

Yet the absence of plot is significant. In Home, plot is what we must get over to get to the meat of the novel. The insufficiency of human action, an insufficiency the characters struggle to accept, is the kernel of Robinson’s theology expressed in literary form. It is what makes her novel important for our time.

Home is a companion novel to Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Gilead. Like its partner, Home takes place in the mid-1950s in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. While Gilead presents the memoirs and musings of John Ames, an aging Congregationalist minister, Home focuses on Ames’s namesake, the son of Ames’ best friend and colleague Robert Boughton. Jack, as John Ames Boughton is called, has been both the most loved and the most destructive member of his minister-father’s large brood. Despite the love and attention of his family, Jack gets into trouble again and again, finally fathering a child with a poor young woman from the town. He then abandons her and the child, who dies early. After some 20 years wasted in prison and drinking, he returns.

Whereas Gilead became famous by introducing us to the voice of John Ames in his writings to his son, Home explores the mind and perspective of Glory, Jack’s little sister. Glory, too, has returned to Gilead and cares for her dying father with a clear view of the agony of her black-sheep brother and those he has hurt—and a clearing view of her own spiritual struggles.

The world of Home and Gilead is changing technologically and socially. It is a world in which the old verities and kindnesses of home and faith are less certain than they may have been formerly. Television reaches Gilead, and though town members tell Glory that “many of the older folks find television a great comfort,” it doesn’t seem to be so for the Boughton household, whose members are brought into conflict over seeing racial violence in Montgomery, Alabama on it.

Over the course of the two novels, we watch the diminishing strength of the best friends and colleagues John Ames and Robert Boughton. Their failing health and mental/theological capacities are poignant in part because of the less-ardent energies of those following behind. For example, Glory’s piety is primarily filial in origin and her devotions seem quaint. The novel tells us “faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father.”

The main questions of Home—how can we be saved from the weight of our sins? In what may we hope?—are brought to life so vividly in Jack that they seem to bring new urgency to Glory’s habitual belief. Jack believes that he is predestined for perdition. Not only the consequences of his sins deny him hope, but also the bloody and long-standing sins perpetrated by his country. These include the sins of racial discrimination and violence especially, which prevent him from legally marrying his black wife and legitimizing his mixed-race son.

Because Home shares its narrative world and much of its meager plot with Gilead, readers familiar with the latter may know before beginning to read the way things turn out for most of the characters. As a result, the novel’s tension does not emerge from curiosity about the end, but rather from our struggle to accept it. The reader wants to save Jack’s soul. We, like Jack, Glory and Old Boughton, have to slowly and painfully give up hope for what we want to happen. Like Old Boughton, we have to “stop tormenting” ourselves “with the thought that [we] can do anything about—anything.”

The only glimmer of hope we have comes from John Ames’s wife, a quiet woman who married Ames late, giving him a son in his old age. Lila gathers her courage at the climax of the book to insist that salvation is possible, though mysterious. She tells Jack,  “A person can change. Everything can change.”  The narrative clearly highlights the importance of the moment by being shocked out of its third-person, limited perspective on Glory into third-person omniscience, registering the wonder of Ames and Boughton. However, the narrative doesn’t explain how things can change, or whether they will.

Home uses its slow pace of narrative rumination as a theological counterargument to human desires that seek to have our own invented plots and technologies take the place of divine providence. All of Robinson’s books are formal challenges to the contemporary pace of reading. If readers want insights that are no longer than a text-message, with easily discernible morals and perfect resolutions, they will find themselves frustrated with Home. Reading Home, though, through the frustration, is a deeply necessary lesson in contemplation.

Home is also a response to modern and present-day beliefs about progress, works gospels, and bootstraps politics—a negative response she has sounded in all her works. Perhaps Robinson didn’t foresee the rhetorical and legislative frenzy of responses to the financial downturn. But even if she didn’t, this book marks another approach, one less enamored with or optimistic about the powers and abilities of humans to enact change. Readers heady and invigorated by the chant of “yes we can” may be helpfully countered and balanced in their thinking by Robinson’s quiet, but insistent “No, we can’t.”

Of course, we are to love, forgive, recognize and respond to the sorrows of our neighbors as we can—and the novel has ample evidence of that. While Home shows strong interest in Jack, by the end of the novel Glory has become a significant thematic focus. This happens as she realizes that her tasks are not to be calculated attempts at change but rather resignation and preservation. This includes the keeping of all the household objects that stand as mementos of God’s grace. Her realization, accomplished while ruminating on the porch, allows her to recognize the work of providence and glory in it, tasks well worth a human life.

The lines and life in Home give us plenty of space for that kind of rumination and realization. And if preservation is not the whole of the cultural mandate, it’s a good half of it, a half that puts us more in mind of God’s providence than our own cultivating.

Tiffany Eberle Kriner is Assistant Professor of English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.

While I respectfully disagree with my son’s recommendation (at least for non-children readers), I completely concur with his observation. Coraline is a freaky, creepy, and eerie nightmare. It’s also very good.

For those unfamiliar, Coraline tells the story of an 11-year-old heroine recently moved from her faraway home to a spooky old house with a dark history.  Although Gaiman’s novel takes place in England, Selick Americanizes the film by shifting the setting to Oregon.

Ignored by inattentive and stressed-out parents, Coraline discovers a miniature door hidden beneath the wallpaper in her dilapidated home. During the day, a brick wall blocks her entrance. But at night, the mortar gives way to a billowing umbilical chord of a tunnel. Through this blue and pink passage, Coraline transports herself into an idealized, parallel version of her less than ideal life. In this spiffy, bizarro world, her improved, albeit button-eyed, parents faun over her. The gravy dish literally chugs across the dinner table on a tiny train (get it?). The expansive multi-level garden surrounding the house flourishes like Eden before the Fall.

As we soon learn, however, this fantastic world is no Eden. Students of fantasy fiction know that menace usually waits on the other side of magical portals. In terms of sheer disturbing danger, the sinister force that lurks behind Coraline’s diminutive door makes the Duchess on the other side of Alice’s rabbit hole, or the even the White Witch behind Narnia’s wardrobe, seem soothing by comparison.

Among Coraline’s many strengths, none impress more than its dazzling visuals. Under Selick’s leadership, cinematographer Pete Kozachik, animation head Anthony Scott and visual effects supervisor Brian Van’t Hul, each deserve their own little bald statue. I regret that I was not able to see their inventive work in its 3-D glory. Still, the computerized enhancement of classic stop motion animation produces such depth on the screen that I would swear I was wearing those silly glasses after all.

The settings slide between jaw-dropping instances of serene beauty and sinister segments of comic ugliness. The scene in which Coraline’s “other father” takes her for an aerial tour of his burgeoning flower garden pulses with vibrancy, color and whimsy. Such opulent views eventually warp into surreal distortions. With shades of Salvador Dali, the bodies of Coraline’s antagonists transform into nightmarish caricatures of form—all bony shoulders and protruding posteriors.

It would be a shame if Coraline’s unsettling scariness keeps Christian audiences away from the theatre or the DVD. The film has much to offer. Gospelandculture.org currently posts a wonderful essay by Kristin Kobes Du Mez about evangelical culture’s tendency to cast women as damsels in need of rescue. If you share Kobes Du Mez‘s concern for this pervasive portrayal of women, Coraline’s characterization provides a needed antidote.

Faithfully voiced by Dakota Fanning, she is strong, assertive, smart, brave and inherently good. If Coraline offers a positive role model for tweens, her preoccupied parents offer a needed corrective for adults. In other words, this parenting gig goes by awfully fast. Pay attention!

Coraline also provides a needed ingredient to its genre: moral complexity. Much of contemporary animation sanitizes fantasy of its nuance. We get villains so blatantly bad and heroes so perfectly good that not even a three-year-old could fail to notice the difference. This kind of animated melodrama has its place, but it is not very honest.

Sometimes, bad things hide in bright and beautiful packages. Coraline boldly stares at wickedness masquerading as righteousness. In doing so, it cleverly unmasks the lie. Christians should appreciate a film that takes evil seriously.

Robert Hubbard is Associate Professor of Theater and Speech at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa.

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1939, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection.

The show Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life, at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. through May 24th, reveals surprising views of the way Morandi’s art takes its “side-door” entrance to greatness. The improbability of the power of the small paintings in this show is a large part of their intrigue.

Morandi’s life-long focus on the expressive value of still life paintings draws attention to a paradoxical ambition at the heart of his art: finitude. The Italian term for the genre of still life painting, natura morta (literally “dead nature”), brings to mind the vague association between restraint and fruitfulness. Correspondingly, Morandi saw the limited circumstances of his life as essential to the production of his paintings. “I have always led a very quiet and retiring life…My only ambition is to enjoy the peace and quiet which I require in order to work.”³

One of the show’s most satisfying aspects is the way it inclines the viewer to contemplate the cumulative value of a quiet life. Viewers of this show who, thanks to dire economic news, have downsizing and forced frugality on their minds, will find some encouragement in carefully looking at the work of an artist who welcomed constraints.

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1943, Oil on Canvas, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Take, for example, a typical still life (right) painted in 1943 that shows the way Morandi places small visual moments in a context that makes them a wonder. First, the very diminutive dimensions of the nine-by-fourteen-inch canvas invite (even require) a closer look. Just as silence creates the condition in which to appreciate a whisper, the setting for the objects in this painting is muted, both in form and color.

Barely visible brush marks in the background show the movements of paint around the objects, revealing the act of their “making” and, simultaneously, making them stand out individually. The most beautiful moment involves the scalloped, purple twists and turns in the porcelain cup. They catch the viewer’s attention in part because Morandi has carefully determined that the other high intensity color in the composition be yellow, purple’s strong complement.

The allure of this small painting of simple objects raises intriguing questions about the power of art. For example, how does this type of painting subvert the expectation that significant cultural expressions must be extravagant (the standard of that thinking summed up in the cliché, “art is a luxury”)? Why does a small painting of fragile vessels, made during the tumultuous last year of Italian Fascism, continue to fascinate and satisfy while more imposing cultural constructions of that period have long since crumbled?

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1826, Oil on Canvas, View from the Farnese Gardens, Rome, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Giorgio Morandi, Landscape with Houses, 1941, Oil on Canvas, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, L.F. Collection.

One answer lies in the way Morandi viewed tradition. In contrast to the Italian Fascists’ self-serving appropriation of cultural heritage, Morandi did not look to the art of the past for monuments of aggrandizing cultural power. Morandi was fascinated with work by artists whose breakthroughs depended on their abilities to find significance in that which lacks prominence. For example, Morandi’s study in the 1920s and 30s (mostly through black-and-white reproductions) of the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was based on his admiration of Corot’s “revolutionary abilities to animate motifs from nature that were inexpressive in themselves.”⁴

In accounting for the artists who most influenced him, Morandi said, “even in a simple subject, a great painter can achieve majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond.”⁵ It was an artist’s approach to subjects that interested him, not the subject matter or content of the work itself. “Nothing is more alien to me than an art which sets out to serve other purposes than those implied in the work.”⁶ Outstanding examples of work by the 18th- and 19th-century artists who influenced Morandi can be seen in other galleries of The Phillips, which Duncan Phillips founded in 1921 as America’s first museum of modern art.

Giorgio Morandi, Self-portrait, 1924, Oil on Canvas, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contempor- anea di Trento e Rovereto, L.F. Collection.

Morandi strictly shaped his life to leave space for long visual inquiries into the appearance of the objects and landscapes around him. In his creative process, he would often work in series, making small changes in the arrangement of objects, the light, and the size of the canvas. To avoid repeating himself (which he felt was a great danger), he would spend a long time comparing different arrangements before he painted them. He refined his paintings by looking for new balance and harmonies.

Critics have compared the compressed and distilled quality of Morandi’s work to poetry.  For example, Holland Cotter wrote last year in The New York Times, “(a)spirants to the role of painter-as-poet are many. Giorgio Morandi was the real thing.”⁷ That comparison is helpful because it creates the expectation that, like receiving the pleasure of a poem, the viewing of the paintings in this show cannot be rushed. Morandi painted with intense visual honesty, coherence, and integrity, but in reproduction his works often fail to convey the impact of the original. Because of the relative quiet of his work (when compared to contemporary visual culture), a stillness of eye is required to catch the murmur of subtle vibrations in color, which are one of these paintings’ great pleasures.

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1960, Oil on Canvas, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection.

For example, the luminous white of the bottle in this 1960 still life (left) caused me to desire one last look as I turned to leave the exhibition.  Following Morandi’s visual cues in this painting, gathering my view together and guiding it to the center, I noticed the easily overlooked blues and pinks behind what had appeared from a distance to be “plain” white. Visitors to the artist’s studio observed that Morandi’s paintings would sometimes begin with bright colors that, when later concealed by subsequent layers of paint, gave an “inner” warmth to the work.⁸ I think that insight into his working process is a key to understanding the paradoxically reserved passion that is felt through these paintings.

I recommend a visit to The Phillips on a Thursday evening, when the collection stays open until 8:30 p.m. The time when a day’s work is done and rest is near probably has the greatest store of the expansive and unhurried moments suited for viewing Morandi’s art.  As white flowers at that time of day reflect the light of twilight, these paintings promise an offering from the quiet life that made them.

¹ Flavio Fergonzi and Elisabetta Barisoni, Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life (Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection, 2009), 12.
² Edouard Roditi, Dialogues in Art (New York: Horizon Press, 1961), 52.
³ Ibid., 58.
⁴ Fergonzi and Barisoni, Morandi, 27.
⁵ Roditi, Dialogues in Art, 63.
⁶ Ibid., 54.
⁷ Holland Cotter, “All That Life Contains, Contained,” nytimes.com, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/arts/design/19mora.html?scp=1&sq=morandi&st=cse. <3.24.2009>
⁸ Roditi, Dialogues in Art, 64.

James Schaefer is a student at Westminster Theological Seminary who also works with The Gospel & Culture Project. Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life runs through May 24, 2009 at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.