It’s over here.

Once again, it’s time for my year-end(ish) picks. You’re probably saying, “It’s a new year already.” I say, “Meh” (which is in the dictionary now, by the way). As per the previous lists, this is a list of arts and entertainment I encountered for the first time in 2008, not necessarily stuff that was released in 2008. It is more autobiographical. You’ll notice a lot of 2007 films on the list since I got to watching most of them after 2007 was over. 2007 was arguably the strongest year for movies in a long time—perhaps since 1999? Well, here are my picks, in no particular order. And oh yeah, happy New Year.

I’m behind in my reviews for Andy Crouch’s book Culture Making, so here’s my overdue discussion of chapter 3, “Teardowns, Technology and Change.”

In this chapter, Crouch critiques dominant views of how cultural change comes about: progress and revolution. The problem with the myth of progress is that many of our most important cultural goods cannot be improved. They can be changed, but how does one measure improvement to things such as language? The English language has grown and evolved over the years, but is it any better or worse than the language used by the Saxons? They were certainly able to communicate and make sense of their world using the language they possessed even if it had just a fraction of the vocabulary we have today. Instead of progress, Crouch suggests we evaluate cultural change through integrity. “We can speak of progress when a certain arena of culture is more whole, more faithful to the world of which it is making something.” (54)

Crouch establishes that cultural change has two key components: the “speed of change” and the “longevity of impact.” (56) He argues that often, the faster a layer of culture changes, the less likely that its influence will last that long. Conversely, “any change that will profoundly move the horizons of possibility and impossibility will almost always, by definition, take lots of time. The bigger the change we hope for, the longer we must be willing to invest, work and wait for it.” (56-57)

The second assumed means of cultural change Crouch addresses is revolution. Most revolutions have a desire to tear down some system or structure that currently exists. More often than not, they do not have an alternative to put into place after the demolition is complete. Thus, revolutions move at great speeds, but they often do not have long lasting effects. Those “overnight” revolutions that were successful often had a long history leading up to the tipping point. “Nothing that matters, no matter how sudden, does not have a long history and take part in a long future.” (58) Crouch uses the example of Jesus’ resurrection as an event that did not change much in the immediate moment, but few can deny it has become the most culturally significant event in history.

Finally, Crouch adeptly looks at the idea that culture is merely a worldview, a means of thinking. If culture is only or mostly a worldview, then the primary means of engagement and change is analysis. To change culture, one needs to look at all its parts and form a new way of thinking. Crouch thinks this is backwards. “The language of worldview tends to imply…that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking.” (64) He uses the interstate system as his example in that it was not just a result of thinking differently about the world, but the interstate system was itself “a new way of viewing the world.”

In “Cultural Worlds,” the second chapter of Culture Making, Andy Crouch further explains his understanding of the terms culture and culture making. Culture, he says, “requires a public.” (38) That is, for an artifact or a tangible good to become culture, it cannot remain a private product—it must be received by others. T. S. Eliot’s disillusioned poetic masterpiece, “The Waste Land” is therefore culture, whereas the overly metaphorical poem you wrote in the tenth grade raging against the conformity imposed by “the system” with which you meant to impress the girl across the room in geometry and then burned when she went to winter semi-formal dance with someone else, is not culture. “Culture making is people (plural) making something of the world.” (40)

Crouch helpfully describes cultures as having scales and spheres, that is, different cultures have limits and different sizes. The most basic and most powerful culture is the family unit. So if we are to change culture or make culture, we must know what sphere or scale of culture we address. The smaller the culture, the easier it is to make lasting change. To change the English language is difficult, whereas changing your family’s dinner rituals is much easier.

Because the way the world has changed with communication and transportation, most people are no longer born into one culture where they will likely remain. Instead, most people have become cultural immigrants, often “in pursuit of economic or political opportunities.” Christians who have become immigrants “in pursuit of evangelistic or religious opportunities” are called missionaries. “But as the wheels within culture overlap more and more in a mobile world, most of us have some choice about which cultures we will call our own. We are almost all immigrants now, and more of us than we may realize are missionaries too.” (48-49) I would argue that all Christians are missionaries.

Eddy has created an online book club of sorts to discuss Andy Crouch’s new work, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. I first encountered Crouch’s writing when he wrote for and edited the excellent, but now defunct magazine re:genereation Quarterly. The jacket of Culture Making’s states, “It is not enough to condemn culture. Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture, copy culture or consume culture. The only way to change culture is to create culture.” This post will discuss the book’s introduction and first chapter.

Introduction:
Crouch says that Christians and their relation to culture have been in the stages of childhood or youth. Childhood’s essence is innocence and youth’s essence is awareness. He calls us to become adults with regard to culture and the essence of adulthood is responsibility. The Church has gone from innocence of culture to awareness of it and we seem to enjoy that place where we can critique and engage. But Crouch believes we need to be at the task of making culture.

Many criticized H. Richard Neibuhr’s seminal work, Christ and Culture for not offering a definition of culture, and Crouch tries to avoid that mistake. He says, “We talk about culture as if it were primarily a set of ideas when it is primarily a set of tangible goods.” (10) He also discloses his influences, namely the Dutch Reformed theologian turned statesman Abraham Kuyper who called people to cultural responsibility. I have Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism somewhere, but I haven’t read it yet.

For Crouch, culture needs to be created in the power of God. “Culture is not finally about us, but about God.” (13)

My review of Christopher Nolan’s latest take on Batman, The Dark Knight can be read here. The brief summary is that I liked it. A lot.

I posted my review of Pixar’s latest film, Wall-E over on my arts blog. You can read it here.

It certainly took me a long time, but I finally finished reading Jeffrey Stout’s political, theological, and philosophical tome, Democracy and Tradition. In the work, Stout sets out to defend a pragmatic approach to building a democratic society that takes seriously each citizen’s right to reach decisions via whatever means or commitments they deem important as well as all citizens’ responsibility to offer reasons to others for their conclusions. Democracy happens in the confluence of peoples’ beliefs and reason-giving. For Stout, democratic pragmatism is not merely a label that best describes how we interact with people who hold different ideals and beliefs than us, but it is a tradition in and of itself that deserves thought, defense, and promotion. America is in danger, he warns us, if the citizens of the United States do not take seriously the fact that we are all in this thing called democracy together. Stout, a self-labeled atheist, shows great appreciation for religions and religious people and articulately defends their right to use religious reasoning to shape their beliefs and ethics. (I reflected on some of the book earlier here.)

Stout critically engages liberal secularists like John Rawls on the one hand and the New Traditionalists within Christianity like Stanley Hauerwas and Alistair MacIntyre on the other as holding positions that do not help democracy. Though his two main interlocutors see each other as opposites, Stout points out that they actually share very similar views of what democracy actually is. His main argument against the liberal secularists is that we cannot guard the public square with rigid demands of what counts as reasonable data for democratic decision-making. The social contract theory of Rawls does not accurately describe how democracy has functioned, nor does it offer a hopeful vision for a pluralistic society in that it seeks to keep religious reasoning either out of the discussion altogether, or to be seen as weaker evidence. For those who say religion should not be involved in democratic reasoning, Stout not only says that ideal is unrealistic given the passion people have for their religions—how does one cast aside their deepest commitments that shape their ethics and values?—but he also says it is inherently undemocratic to do so. American democracy has benefited largely from religious reasoning—he cites the abolitionist sermons of the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons as high points in both religious and democratic thinking in America.

As seen above, Stout agrees with many of the New Traditionalists’ critiques of the social contract theory. He thinks, however, that the New Traditionalists have bought the line that this theory encapsulates modernity, pluaralism, secularism, and democracy. The New Traditionalists see democracy as a child of modernity that emphasized the individual over and often against community. They do not see how this system can engender virtues or community and thus it can hardly be described as a tradition in a classical sense. By its nature, democracy leads us towards an atomized society, they argue. They wonder if it is in their tradition’s (i.e., Christianity’s) best interest to continue to participate in democracy given the negative affects that system has had on their community (i.e., the Church). Stout pushes back against the New Traditionalists by saying democracy, which for better or worse, is our society’s system of organization, is not made better when groups of its citizens, whether they are Christians or Black Nationalists, decide to remove themselves from it. Nor are those other traditions improved by interacting only with others in their enclave. Again, he cites the religious reasoning of Lincoln, King, and the abolitionists to show religion’s positive impact on democratic thinking.

Juno (2007) is a warm blanket of a movie. The more I think about it, the more I like it. I remember whole scenes, lines of dialogue, songs from the soundtrack, and looks on the actors’ faces and they make me smile. The movie works on all cylinders, but the true power comes from the triumvirate of screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Jason Reitman, and star Ellen Page as the title character.

Juno tells the story of the 16-year old girl Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) who becomes pregnant after enlisting her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) to try sex. Juno then sets up an adoption with Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark Loring (Jason Bateman), a yuppie couple who hasn’t been able to conceive. The rest of the story follows Juno’s pregnancy as she tries but is unable to maintain her distance from her situation. We witness some predictable scenes, such as Juno telling her father and step-mother (wonderfully played by J. K. Simmons and Allison Janney, respectively) that she’s pregnant, but these scenes don’t play in a predictable way. After Juno informs them, Mac, her father, says to Bren:

Mac: “Did you see that coming?”
Bren: “Yeah, but I was hoping she was expelled, or into hard drugs.”
Mac: “That was my first instinct too. Or a DWI. Anything but this.”

The plot is anything but straightforward and I’ll leave most of the surprises intact for you. Suffice it to say, we deal with real emotions of the characters, not with Hollywood cliches of characters in similar situations. Juno understands that she’s not ready to be a mother, so her connection with her child is not the guilt of giving it up, but the worry that a healthy, stable, and loving household could actually exist for her baby.

Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor’s 1960’s musical featuring only The Beatles’ songs is perhaps the most mixed bag of a movie to come out in 2007. I wanted to like the film more than I did, but its whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. The visuals are stunning and whole scenes work extremely well, reinterpreting many of the songs and drawing the audience into the characters’ world. On the other hand, there is no narrative drive connecting those scenes and the story is predictable. It feels like watching a string of extremely well-made music videos (I’ve put some links in this post, and if you follow them, you’ll see YouTube clips of the songs in the film). At moments, the film comes across as an interesting experiment trying to create a world from within The Beatles’ music and at other moments those same interesting bits feel a tad too clever, with heavy-handed homages. For example, any named character in the film gets that name from a person in a Beatles song. Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) are the protagonists fighting to stay in love. Their friends include Prudence (T.V. Carpio), Sadie (Dana Fuchs), Max (Joe Anderson), and JoJo (Martin Luther). If those names pique your interest, or if you just rolled your eyes at the same idea, it may be a sign of how well this film works for you. For me, I kept expecting Eleanor Rigby to appear. (She doesn’t.)