“To Honor the Incarnation”

A Review of
Advent Conspiracy:
Can Christmas Still Change the World?
By Rick McKinley, Chris Seay and Greg Holder.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

Advent Conspiracy:
Can Christmas Still Change the World?
By Rick McKinley, Chris Seay and Greg Holder.
Paperback: Zondervan, 2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Consumerism is one of the greatest challenges facing the churches in North America today.  Regardless of our own personal assets (or lack thereof), we are living in one of the wealthiest nations in the history of humankind and with our great wealth, we indulge ourselves with all sorts of amusements, luxuries and labor-saving devices at great cost to ourselves, the environment and the health and security of all humankind.  It is one of the greatest contemporary ironies in the Church that our bondage to consumerism becomes most apparent during the season in which Christ followers have traditionally celebrated the birth of the Christ child.  For the last several years, the Advent Conspiracy has been challenging churches to put our consumerist practices under careful scrutiny, especially during the Christmas season.  And now the three pastors that founded the Advent Conspiracy – Rick McKinley of Portland’s Imago Dei Church, Chris Seay of Houston’s Ecclesia and Greg Holder of St. Louis’ The Crossing – have written a book that challenges us to “Spend less,” “Give more,” “Love All” and “Worship Fully.”

The authors, however, begin this new book Advent Conspiracy: Can Christmas Still Change the World?, with the declaration that consumerism is the “fastest-growing religion in the world”:

The fastest-growing religion in the world is not Islam or Christianity; the symbol of this rising faith is not the star and crescent or the cross, but a dollar sign.  This expanding belief system is radical consumerism. It promises transcendence, power, pleasure, and fulfillment even as it demands complete devotion.  Many American Christians have decided they can, to put it bluntly, love both God and money.  … American Christians have incorporated their devotion to consumerism with their Christian faith. Yet every step we make toward consumerism is one step farther off the path of Jesus the Liberating King (21-22).

In confronting the religion of consumerism, the Advent Conspiracy authors have provided us with a wonderful, challenging and easy-to-read book that calls us to repent and bow in worship before the Christ child, God who in the perfect act of love became human.  Indeed, of the authors’ three main points, worship is primary and is the point that they address first.  To truly worship someone or something, the authors observe, is to desire it.  They re-trace the story of Christ’s birth, showing how the people in this story – Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men – are compelled to worship in the presence of Christ the newborn King.  Thus, they challenge us with pointed questions: “What might happen, if at Advent and throughout the year, all of God’s people worshiped like the Magi? What transformation would occur as God’s people moved across the globe loving Jesus with our time, attention and money?” (46).  The authors contend that if we can begin to re-order our desires to reflect true worship of Christ, the other practices of spending less, giving more and loving all will come more naturally for us.

Recognizing that the call to “spend less” is ambiguous and can be complicated – there are some times at which we should spend more, e.g., when directly helping others to “keep gainful employment, feed their children and get basic medical care” (56) – the authors challenge us to give simple and thoughtful gifts that fit the personality of the recipient.  Reflecting on the Incarnation, the authors call us to give more of ourselves and our time.  They observe:

If we can resist the trap of giving easy gifts, and if we can reject the assumption that giving expensive gifts or many gifts is the best way to express love, something else might begin to happen.  We might experience moments of relational giving that our friends and family will care about and remember.  Our kids will learn what it means to give gifts that are personal and meaningful. Our neighbors and coworkers and friends will watch us celebrate Christmas differently, and they’ll hear the good news loud and clear through the seasonal static. (78)

The fourth and final tenet of the Advent Conspiracy manifesto is to “love all,” and here the authors implore us to broaden the horizons of our generosity – loving and giving gifts not only to those who love us (and give us gifts) in return, but also loving and sharing with the “the poor, the forgotten, the marginalized and the sick” around the world.  We can read this chapter on loving all as a response to the question: “What are we to do with the money we save by spending less on Christmas presents?”  “Picture entire churches,” say the authors, “deciding that some of the money they are saving by giving relationally and resisting cultural norms should be given to the ‘least of these’ in our communities and world – that’s when Christmas makes a difference” (88).

The Advent Conspiracy book (and accompanying DVD, which I have not yet seen but for which a study guide is included at the end of the book), has a simple message that calls us to follow faithfully in the way of Jesus, not being conformed to the pattern of this world, but being transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2). This book is an essential one; one that North American churches must prayerfully read, discuss and reflect upon this Advent season, and in so doing, we will continue to be transformed further into the image of Christ and thus bear witness to the love and reconciliation that has come in Christ for all humankind!

“The maker’s joy in what is made;
The joy in which we come to rest“

A Review of
Leavings: Poems.
By Wendell Berry.

Reviewed by Brent Aldrich.

Leavings: Poems.
By Wendell Berry.
Hardcover: Counterpoint,  2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Reading Wendell Berry’s new book of poems, Leavings, I return to the work of this Kentucky farmer for the same reasons as always: a clarity of language; an interweaving of art and work with the natural rhythms of living and dying; and a vision that looks beyond the present powers to describe the very immanence of the kingdom of God, come on earth. Berry himself, no less, often sounds as if he is reflecting on a long life in his place on the farm and as a writer:

The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?

Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit

our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,

the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope

then to belong to your place by your own knowledge

of what it is that no other place is, this

place that you belong to though it is not yours,

for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.   [91]

Derived from Berry’s native soil, these poems always return to human life which conforms to the order of creation; with a preference for internal or slant rhymes, these poems have an internal cadence that reinforces the structure of the whole. In two parts, Leavings begins with poems written as letters, questions, a speech, and others, most often in a free verse, although iambic pentameter or a haiku can appear so gracefully as to make the complexity of the forms seem only natural.

Part two of Leavings is the newest installment of Sabbath poems, from 2005 – 2008, picking up right where Berry’s last book of poems Given left off, and continuing the cycle begun in 1979.  These Sabbath poems, “occasioned by Berry’s Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation” are as varied in form and content as any healthy ecosystem or community could be, although several themes emerge – death and aging; the streams near Berry’s farm and others as markers of time; the daily and seasonal resurrection of the natural order by grace; and the kingdom of heaven embodied on earth – all of which come into focus through a life lived in conversation with the farm, woods, and stream in Kentucky, and his wife, Tanya.

To suggest the complexity of Berry’s task as a writer, a farmer and a human, as well as the inherent interconnectedness of his work with his place, “The Book of Camp Branch,” a Sabbath poem from 2006 compares “Camp Branch, my native stream,” its contours and sounds, with Berry’s walks along the stream, and the further translation to language. The layers of the stream itself, the walker in the stream, and the language as representation all inform the others:

Going down stone by stone,

the song of the water changes,

changing the way I walk

which changes my thought

as I go. Stone to stone

the stream flows. Stone to stone

the walker goes. The words

stand stone still until

the flow moves them, changing

the sound – a new word –

a new place to step or stand.   [64]

Berry’s description is for an art which is informed by a physical inhabiting the world, which is in turn informed by the natural rhythms such as the song of the stream; art, then, becomes another embodying of the thoughts and relationships afforded by his place in the world. And in writing about the stream, Berry continues a dialogue in which his language clarifies the stream, while simultaneously the stream clarifies Berry; this is not an unfamiliar theme for Berry, as I am reminded of “Damage” in What Are People For? in which Berry writes, “I now live in my subject. My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place.”

Similarly, Berry describes the order of creation as precursor for human work, as in “Sabbaths 2008, I.”, coming upon two horses, seemingly posed in perfect unity, “a possibility / deeply seeded / within the world. It is / the way the world is sometimes” [105]. At the same time, the principalities and powers of the age do continue antagonistically with that order:

In the name of more we destroy

for coal the mountain and its forest

and so choose the insatiable flame

over the green leaf that within our care

would return to us unendingly

until the end of time.   [107]

Set against deforestation and mountaintop removal in the Kentucky hills, these poems are as elegiac as anything, mourning the very real loss of entire natural systems.

But Berry continues to see heaven embodied in all of this earth, despite the fragmentation and destruction by plan or by error: “Heaven is only present, instantaneous and eternal, / a mayfly, a blue dayflower, a life entirely given, / complete forever in its hour” [116]. Leavings is a book full of a life spent in discerning a particular place, working it and writing about it, such that there is a reciprocity between the  land, Berry’s life, and his language where the fullness of each is expressed only in relation to the other parts. The strength of Berry’s writing is exactly that refusal to fragment parts from the whole, preferring instead the economy of the Kingdom of God in which “undying love which perhaps / is not love at all but gratitude / for the being of all things which / perhaps is not gratitude at all / but the maker’s joy in what is made, / the joy in which we come to rest” [99].

A Brief Review of

Follow Me to Freedom:
Leading and Following as An Ordinary Radical.
Shane Claiborne and John Perkins.
Paperback: Regal Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

There is one popular category of books from which I have yet to review any books – the leadership book.  Who knows how many books on leadership have been published in the last year… certainly hundreds, maybe thousands?  I know I’ve received at least a dozen review copies of new leadership books in the last six months, all unsolicited and all ended up unreviewed and were donated or recycled.  But when I saw that Shane Claiborne – a noted young writer, activist and founding partner of The Simple Way Community in Philadelphia – and John Perkins – an esteemed African-American Christian who was active in the civil rights movement and later founded the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) – had written a book together on leadership (and following), my interest was piqued and I knew that I would have to read and review it.  Both master storytellers, Shane and John collaborate together in Follow Me to Freedom: Leading and Following as An Ordinary Radical, to paint a balanced picture of leadership as a necessary part of the life of the church community. Before I go any further, I must warn you that Follow Me to Freedom is not a typical book; it is a collection of conversations between John and Shane (edited down from one or more larger conversations), and it has a wonderfully refreshing conversational feel to it.   The wisdom that the authors share here is down-to-earth, recognizing many dangers that come along with leadership.  John and Shane cover many qualities of leadership that we see manifested throughout scripture: e.g., vision, justice, prayer, etc.  However, there are some parts that might come as a surprise to some evangelical readers, like a chapter on civil disobedience (which really isn’t all that surprising given the activism in which both authors are involved).  I was particularly struck by Shane and John’s emphasis on the practice of stability (the commitment to being rooted in a place) as one of the highest virtues of leadership.  John says:

We need the stability that comes from putting down roots. We get so many of these volunteers. We get so many people who are coming really just to look at you, to prepare to go look somewhere else.  They’re looking for God … this has taken them from place to place and eventually to us.  Many of them give their lives for a few years and then move somewhere else.  I don’t blame them for moving on, but the fact of the matter is that it creates instability for us and the community – especially the children (161-162).

The authors are also not afraid to tackle the tricky dimensions of race in leadership. Shane observes:

I think a lot of white guys get to be leaders because they’re white guys, not because they’re leaders.  A lot of books sell, not because they’re good, but because they’re marketed well and have money behind them.  That’s not the way Jesus did things. … We – especially we men and we white folks from backgrounds of “so-called privilege”…  – need to take creative risks to make room for other leaders and voices.  It’s certainly not that women or people of color are not good leaders or dynamic communicators, … [it’s] that we haven’t been careful enough, and humble enough, and creative enough to make sure every voice is at the table (76-77).

Yes, Follow Me to Freedom is not your typical leadership book, and as a result if we will take its message seriously, we might just be formed a little bit more into the image of Christ, the sacrificial servant leader, who came to lead us out of the bondage of sin and into the freedom of God’s shalom, for which we were created!

COMMUNITY and CREATIVITY IN RESISTING CONSUMERISM

An Evening with Shane Claiborne
Author of
The Irresistible Revolution, Follow Me to Freedom and other books

Friday November 13 – 7PM
ENGLEWOOD CHRISTIAN CHURCH
57 N. Rural St.- Indianapolis – Near-eastside

Admission is FREE //
(An offering will be taken to support Shane’s work.)
ARRIVE EARLY // Doors open @ 6PM. Seating is limited!

INVITE YOUR FRIENDS !!!
- Facebook invite:  http://bit.ly/ZdoZ6
- Use this printable flyer:
http://englewoodcc.com/consumingfire/shane-claiborne.pdf

This event is part of the
Through the Consuming Fire Conference:
A Conversation on Economic Faithfulness in an Age of Consumerism
http://englewoodcc.com/consumingfire/

“Half-life of Faith”
John Hay, Jr.

A confession and a prayer for my children

I have so far been able to protect my children
from undue fear and outright violence,
from malnourishment and unjust treatment.
I have not, thus far, competently guarded them
from unbridled consumerism and outright greed,
from justification of all things material.

I have taught them the Lord’s Prayer–
duly recited at each table gathering,
but I have not fully shared with them
our indebtedness to a world we have exploited.

I have cautioned them on drugs and addictions,
and lived an ever-sober life before them,
but I have indulged my appetite for trinkets,
and fed their dependency on branded gadgets.

I have instructed the Commandments to the letter,
and called for living the values they commend,
but I wonder how many gods-not-called-gods
and masquerading idols we return to each Monday?

I have commended my zealous evangelical brethren
for calling out obvious social moral dilemmas,
but we together have swallowed camels,
and overlooked deadly sins that consume us all.

I want my children yet to learn from me
the difference between stewarding and possessing,
that what we possess tends to possess us,
that hearts follows treasures every time.

I want to teach my children, long before I pass,
that there remains an authentically traveled way,
beyond and nearer than I have so far made known;
it ever awaits the heart that hungers for God alone.

—–

John Hay, Jr. is a cyclist and poet
based here in Indianapolis.
He blogs at http://www.indybikehiker.com
Reprinted here with the author’s permission.

In our continuing effort to fund the publication and free distribution of The Englewood Review, we are going to be collaborating more intentionally with Christian Book Distributors.  Primarily, we will be offering you the opportunity to buy bargain books from CBD that we think of are interest.  Buying books this way is a win / win / win proposition.  You get great books for a great price,  CBD gets the sale and we get an excellent referral fee from CBD.  These books make great gifts!

This week’s bargain books (Click to learn more/purchase):

The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society By Murray Jardine / Baker $1.99 ! – Save 93%!!! Has Christianity failed to engage the culture of technology and use scientific advancements responsibly? Jardine offers an incisive critique of the damaging elements in Western societies and argues that it’s possible to adandon the destructive aspects of technology while still embracing its benefits. Thought-provoking! 304 pages, softcover from Brazos.

The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church By Gregory A. Boyd / Zondervan $1.99 ! – Save 90%!!! Should church and state really be separated? Does the church belong in the political arena? Arguing from Scripture and history, The Myth of a Christian Nation makes a compelling case that whenever the church gets too close to any political or national ideology, it is disastrous for the church and harmful to society.

The Story of the Christ By Scot McKnight / Baker $1.99 ! – Save 85%!!! For two thousand years the figure of Jesus has been the most powerful and pervasive influence on Western culture, not only in religion and ethics but also in politics, literature, music, and the visual arts. This book features insights from Scot McKnight, author of the bestselling book The Jesus Creed.

28 Page Excerpt from
God’s Economy:
Redefining the Health and Wealth Gospel.
by Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove.
Paperback: Zondervan, 2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Video: Skye Jethani talks about his recent book
The Divine Commodity:
Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity.
Hardback: Zondervan, 2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

“The Transformative Love
of a Place”

A Review of
Wrestling with Moses:
How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s
Master Builder and Transformed the American City.
By Anthony Flint.

Reviewed by Brent Aldrich.

Wrestling with Moses:
How Jane Jacobs Took on NewYork’s
Master Builder and Transformed the American City.
Anthony Flint.
Hardcover: Random House, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Writing in 1980, Michel de Certeau characterizes two uses of the space of the city; one is the “panoramic-city” of the “space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer” who have views of the city afforded by high places, where the details of life are no longer visible. Conversely, “the ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’…they walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city.” These two images are useful when thinking about two influential figures who have come to represent contrasting ends of city planning in recent history, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. Just a glimpse at the cover of Anthony Flint’s new book Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City show Jacobs on the sidewalk, and there is Moses, looming large above a table-sized model of Manhattan, new highways bisecting it.

That both Jacobs and Moses made significant contributions to urban redevelopment while living in New York City in the 1930s – 1970s brings into focus their opposing approaches to neighborhoods in two large projects proposed by Moses and blocked by Jacobs. Wrestling With Moses centers around Washington Square Park and Jacob’s home in Greenwich Village, and the later proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway (Lomex) in what is now Soho. First narrating biographies of Jacobs and Moses, Flint characterizes the two visions for city development as practiced by Jacobs and Moses best when they come up directly against each other.

In the midst of community-based development projects now familiar to many cities, it is hard to imagine the context in which Jacobs found herself in 1950s New York. Beginning as a journalist, Jacobs didn’t begin as a neighborhood activist or urban critic; rather, working for the magazine Architectural Forum she met a developer in Philadelphia, who

“’took me to a street where loads of people were hanging around on the street, on the stoops, having a good time of it, and he said, well, this is the next street we’re going to get rid of. That was the ‘before’ street…Then he showed me the ‘after’ street, all fixed up, and there was just one person on it, a bored little boy kicking a tire in the gutter. It was so grim that I would have been kicking a tire, too. But Mr. Bacon thought it had a beautiful vista.’ She turned to him and asked, ‘Where are the people?’” (19-20).

Filling in for her editor to lecture at Harvard in front of dozens of architectural leaders, whose plans she critiqued, then writing an essay ‘Downtown is for People’ poised Jacobs for a similar neighborhood removal slated for her own neighborhood. This was a Moses plan to run Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park and onto new developments planned south of the park, buildings “know as superblocks, [which] would be set in open space, obliterating the existing network or small streets. In the first phase of the project…130 buildings would be smashed by wrecking balls, and 150 families would have to pack up their belongings” (62).

This totalizing, top-down planning typifies Moses’ approach to city development. Existing structures – and seemingly people – have little place as Moses “developed strategies designed to make his projects inevitable, protecting them from democratic resistance. Along with writing his own legislation and running aggressive public-relations campaigns, one of his principle tactics in defeating opposition was simple: act fast” (44). In large part, Moses’ projects were completed following this strategy and squelching resistance; it is in the proposal for Washington Square Park, though, that he is first defeated, as Jane Jacobs’ ideas about local communities organizing together materialize around saving their neighborhood. Significantly, Greenwich Village joining together and stopping Moses’ planning is a turning point in urban development: “ordinary citizens could see that they could challenge the top down planning that Moses represented…the very things that made cities great were being systematically destroyed by people who didn’t understand how cities functioned and who didn’t know them intimately” (90).

For Jacobs, the experience in her neighborhood became the model for characterizing healthy cities in her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. And yet, although Jacobs based her descriptors of the health of neighborhoods on her own Hudson Street – “a street or district must serve several functions; blocks should be short to make the pedestrian feel comfortable; buildings must vary in age, condition, and use; and population must be dense” (124) – city planners quickly identified Greenwich Village as a blighted area, slated for ‘urban renewal,’ shorthand at the time for razing the existing neighborhood to start over with housing towers. Again, Jacobs is characterized as an advocate and organizer of an existing neighborhood, enacting the criticisms made in Death and Life again in the context of an existing, thriving neighborhood.

A second stand against Moses occurs soon after in Soho, with a plan to build the elevated, ten lane Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would effectively demolish “416 buildings that housed 2,200 families, 365 retail stores, and 480 other commercial establishments” (146). The priest of a neighborhood church slated for demolition enlisted Jacobs to help organize resistance to the proposed expressway. In this neighborhood was “a place that had all the elements that she had described as the model of city living in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. And here, again, the city planners thought they could tear it all down and create something better” (154). Once again, Jacobs and a bottom-up neighborhood initiative save their place.

Wrestling With Moses not only is engaging narrative of the lives and places of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, but in describing the context in which city planning came into its own with the community-driven development and diversified neighborhoods represented by Jacobs, this book becomes a useful aid in considering neighborhoods and development in our own places. Jacobs, it would seem, became such an important voice for cities simply because she loved her own neighborhood so much; certainly, any neighborhood planning that begins and ends with affection for a place will make our cities healthy places to live.

“To See the Fissures and
Hear the Rumblings”

A Review of
The BQE .
a film by Sufjan Stevens.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

The BQE .
A film by Sufjan Stevens.
Copyright 2009, Asthmatic Kitty Records.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

“Listening has something to do with being willing to change ourselves and change our world” – Sr. Joan Chittister

Sufjan Stevens’ new movie The BQE is one of the finest and most creative works of social criticism in recent memory.  The film, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, primarily features footage of traffic on the twisting and often congested highway known as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE).  Stevens intersperses other footage from Brooklyn (architecture, waterways, amusement parks), but his primary counterpoint is three colorfully-clad female hula hoop spinners, working under the pseudonyms Botanica, Quantus and Electress.  As a complement to the movie, Stevens has also produced a comic book in which the three hula-hoopers are portrayed as super-heroes who fight the evil Dr. Moses – a reference to Robert Moses, the progress-oriented urban planner who designed the BQE.  Stevens’ cinematography – presented in a triptych format – captures the winding, free-for-all insanity of the BQE.  In his artist’s statement about the film, Stevens observes that the twisting design of the BQE was mandated by navigating through an already-well-established city with a variety of geographical features like rivers, islands and tidal straits and by the NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) politics that kept the BQE out of prestigious neighborhoods, like Brooklyn Heights.  As Stevens’ comic book illustrates in its simplistic way, the critiques that the BQE raises are aimed primarily at Robert Moses and his visions of cities designed around technological concepts of progress that pay little heed to the holistic health of humanity.  Moses, for instance, designed parks that were “fiercely antagonistic to the natural, bucolic and egalitarian…more prison yard than public park” (Stevens artist statement), and instead were typically focused around competitive, athletic endeavors.  Thus, hula hoopers serve to contrast these focused notions of progress – speeding ahead pell-mell into the future like the BQE traffic on any given day – with the circular motion of the hula hoop, a symbol of a recreational idleness (a la Tom Hodgkinson), which spins in harmony with a person’s motions and never seems to get anywhere.  Stevens further exposits the hula hoop in his artist’s statement:

[The] Hula hoop couldn’t be more at odds with modernity.  Americans of the 1950s were linear people, hard working and industrious.  They fought world wars, drove big cars, and built mammoth roadways in the name of progress.  Their popular sports reflected the same: baseball and football were competitive and strategic games … The hoop couldn’t be more different.  It required no teams.  It wasn’t competitive. It wasn’t linear.  It was philosophically personal and metaphysically absurd, a gratuitous recreation built around a simple circular tube of plastic meant for nothing more than idle enjoyment and exercise.

These critiques of progress, along with the film’s tightly-crafted instrumental soundtrack have earned it comparisons with the best socially critical films of our time (most notably, Koyaanisqatsi).  But unlike some critics, who dismiss the BQE as merely rehashing  Koyaanisqatsi, I would argue that Stevens’ film has at least one significant distinguishing feature, the specificity of its rootedness in a particular place.  Not only was the BQE funded by the people of Brooklyn, but Stevens – a resident of Brooklyn himself – demonstrates a deep love for, and in his pointed criticisms, a strong desire for the transformation of Brooklyn into a more healthy and humane environment.  In laying the ground work for shooting, the film and penning the scores, Stevens undoubtedly spent numerous hours and days listening to Brooklyn, eventually forging a deeper understanding of the nature of the place.  And in listening and being attentive (a rare practice in our modern age), Stevens begins to embody the wisdom expressed by Sr. Joan Chittister at the outset of this review and thus out of his listening began to emerge artistically-expressed yearnings for the transformation of himself, of Brooklyn and indeed of all humanity.  We would do well to follow the example of Stevens and to begin to nurture practices of listening to our own locales – countercultural in our age of the placelessness of globalization – and through listening to begin to imagine the transformation of these places (and ourselves).

Over the course of its brief 40 minute span, the cinematography of The BQE is not only deeply rooted in the Brooklyn locale, portraying it from a host of perspectives (moving and stationary), but full of poignant imagery from the shifting between the spinning hula hoop and the spinning tire to the nighttime ride zipping through the lined city streets accompanied by a video-game-like electronica movement of the soundtrack.  The triptych format lends itself well to some visually stunning scenes, especially toward the end of the film where Stevens’ flips the film for one of the frames to create a striking symmetry, forging the illusion that the same cars are going in opposite directions at the same time.  This visual illusion, along with the others that Stevens crafts here, are apt images to depict the BQE, itself an illusion of progress woven by Robert Moses into the fabric of life in Brooklyn, but as Stevens notes, the BQE like all illusions, is beginning to crumble: “portentous pot holes, cracked concrete, bowed railing and rusted buttresses signify the mortality of an expressway – whose safety and construction standards rate far below National Interstate Highway criteria.”  To crumble, I suppose is the nature of all illusions, and the prophetic role of the artist is to see the fissures and hear the rumblings and to call us all to renounce the illusion and to begin to change our ways and thus to find ways of living that are more healthful and sane.  Stevens has offered us a brilliant critical work of this sort in The BQE; may it inspire us to create similarly revealing works rooted in thousands of different places, wherever we find ourselves, and may we in the process begin to see the transformation not only of these places, but of all creation as well.