Close Encounters of the Cultural Kind
Blog / Produced by The High Calling
A couple of weeks ago a colleague and I had to explain the importance of engaging contemporary culture to the students we teach at Geneva College. After a semester of discussing the influence of the enlightenment on culture for the last 200 years, suddenly the students were confronted with a culture they’re used to: today's. And it turns out that engaging the culture we live in can be more difficult than discerning those from the past.
I shared the analogy with them that life is like being a goldfish in a bowl. It’s one thing to search for little flecks of food and avoid bumping into plastic plants, but quite another to pay attention to the quality of the water. Discerning culture is like that. We take culture for granted and participate in it as if it were a neutral context. The trouble with this kind of thinking is that we often fail to see its negative consequences as well as miss out on what is truly excellent. In other words, the water quality matters, but our minds and bodies can only take in so much of the environment.
I’ve realized since my own undergraduate years how difficult discerning contemporary culture can be, yet I’ve never given up on the idea that doing it is an essential task. While this is at times challenging work, it’s also an area where I find delight and joy in the process of knowing and loving the world.
Encountering Culture
Recently I’ve been thinking about the word engagement. I know I’ve used it here already but I’m not sure I like how it is often used when applied to culture. Engagement is a good first step, yet it leaves me in a rather conflicted relationship with culture, as if culture is an opponent that needs to be outsmarted and outmaneuvered. I see Christian review sites and magazines that seem to take this tone. “The culture is going to get you,” they say.
I wonder if a better posture would be encounter. Encounter implies hospitality, a meeting of equals, a shared benefit to each involved. For Christians to truly encounter culture, we need to posture ourselves toward celebrating the good and excellent while also thoughtfully and lovingly critiquing what is not.
The essence of encountering culture then is dialogue. Dialogue offers us a uniquely human way of being in the world and not of it. It is in dialogue with culture that we’re not only improved and educated by it, but we also help to shape it through our interpretations and insights. Ultimately, this dialogue shapes the communities we belong to, which in turn further shapes who we are. It’s not a solitary act, but rather a conversation which invites others to join and belong. And it’s through these communities that grace can be worked out in the world.
This is why I write about culture. It starts a conversation and helps us encounter the world – the water we live in. This, in turn, invites response that brings about not only the flourishing of good culture, but also our own flourishing.
Or so I hope.
Have you ever had a close encounter with culture that helped you see more clearly?
Where does hospitality show up in your encounter with popular culture in particular?
Photo by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by Greg Veltman.