Category: ideas

There’s a newly elected Gen-X leader, and he has no time for the culture wars of the past. “Greear has promised to lead the denomination down a different path, which, he has said, must include efforts both to repent of a ‘failure to listen to and honor women and racial minorities’ and ‘to include them in proportionate measures in top leadership roles.’ If the meeting in Dallas is any indication, his vision is resonating with a large number of the next wave of Baptist leaders.” But many artists and, indeed, the arts in the U.S., have been burned. What’s that path again?

Oracles such as Delphi have fallen out of favour as homes for legitimate understandings. These days, we build tailor-made places where diverse judgments about different kinds of realities get settled: churches and other sacred spaces for sustaining transcendental verities; laboratories for making scientific claims about the natural world; courthouses for deciding the facts of a case. Such specialised ‘truth-spots’ lend credibility to beliefs or claims that come from there.

Automation has also changed how people shop, park, fly, and more. In the process, it has reshaped the architecture that contains those experiences—making them more efficient, often, but also putting machines above people.

New research reveals we quite literally create God in our own image, and envision him in ways that imply he is meeting our emotional needs. That means the God of liberals has a different look than his conservative counterpart.

For many, no defense or condemnation of cultural appropriation is required, because such complaints are almost beyond the realm of comprehension in the first place. Without cultural appropriation we would not be able to eat Italian food, listen to reggae, or go to Yoga. Without cultural appropriation we would not be able to drink tea or use chopsticks or speak English or apply algebra, or listen to jazz, or write novels. Almost every cultural practice we engage in is the byproduct of centuries of cross-cultural pollination. The future of our civilization depends on it continuing. Yet the concept was not always so perplexing.

“The posters and films produced in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s have become totemic representations of the genre, and as such the idea of ‘propaganda’ is now synonymous with aggressive, bold representations of utopian ideals, spouting malicious untruths against enemies, or manipulating and controlling their compliant populations. Such a simplistic conception undermines the often complex, creative and thoughtful productions of propagandists whose work in that crucible of political agitation still appears fresh and thought-provoking today.”

A facade of Europeanization couldn’t fix everything: “The new Europe … never really made it into everyday life, into council estates and suburbs, other than when the former were demolished to make way for something more ‘aspirational’. If the centre of Manchester became like a cheaper, rainier Barcelona, its suburbs and satellites remained resolutely part of 80s England, with all the retail parks, developers’ housing, and dreary jobs that entailed. Lottery-funded arts complexes couldn’t replace skilled work, secure housing and a sense of purpose.”

A classic book of speculative biology gets an update and gets republished. “The mythological-looking creatures illustrated in the book seem to come out of a Tim Burton movie. There’s the rabbuck, a rabbit-like animal that has grown the size of a deer because it lives where there are no predators. Then, there’s the reedstilt — also called Harundopes virgatus — with a long, beaky snout and razor thin legs to snatch fish out of the water. And mountainous regions will be inhabited by the groath.”