Author Archives: Dave

As you already know, I’m a news junkie. I think any writer should be. But if I turn on/log on to one more newscast and hear Anna Nichole Smith’s name…honestly, I’m going to throw up.

Smith was never an entertainment figure that fascinated me. Granted, there are few that do, but hers was a name I barely knew until this fiasco. I would wager a guess that there are many of you reading this that feel the same way. She was a blonde model with some relational and family difficulties. She never struck me as that attractive, and I feel the normal mixture of disdain and sympathy that I feel for other Playmates. Her death was tragic, as are all deaths. It was mysterious. There’s a history of mysterious deaths in her family. The aftermath with her family and significant others is a trainwreck. I acknowledge all of these.

What the whole thing is not: newsworthy.

I’m sorry for the grieving family. I hope they find peace, and I hope that Smith was ready to cross the line between the physical and spiritual realms. My heart breaks if she wasn’t. But this dominating our news coverage for as long as it has? A bit sensationalist, don’t you think?

I suppose the upshot of it is that we don’t have to look at or hear President Bush’s military stupidity quite so much. Take the positive where you can find it, right?

I shy away from tabloids for a reason. I want hard news. I want to know what’s going on, what has substance to it. I recognize the cultural validity of celebrity icons, but excessive coverage of anything is damaging to credibility of journalism.

At least leave it in the entertainment section instead of all over the headlines. I think we would all be thankful.

I’m having difficulty reconciling things again.

Well, at least its a different set of things this time. I just read this great article in the January issue of Poetry Magazine. The writer, Durs Grunbein, attributes what he refers to as the “infantilization” of poetry to the attacks of Greek philosophers. Since that time, he points out, the poet has been reduced to speak about himself and his art more than making social commentary. Ironically, Grunbein points out, the poet is alone is being able to connect the theoretical and abstract ponderings of the intellectual and spiritual realms with the concrete world surrounding us, moreso than theologians or philosophers ever can.

I would draw this comparison to art in general, whatever the expressive form. Theologians, philosophers, and psychologists are great and analyzing the underlying foundations of life and emotions and relationships. However, where our sociology, epistemology, and even Christology falls short is in its expression. The language of the emotional self and of the spiritual self cannot be expressed by analytical means. To do so falls hopelessly short. Artistic creativity is where the individual (and, Tillich would say, a society) express their love, their hope, the sheer angst of their human condition. Scripture is a great example. All types of men were inspired by the Spirit to speak of a variety of analytical topics, but all were expressed in beautiful writing of a variety of genres, from letters to poetry to historical chronicles (and, some have even argued, drama).

Before I digress, what I’m having difficulty reconciling is Grunbein’s point that analytical minds focused on the bettering of society cast aside artists as being hardly useful. Certainly, this is a trend that continues today. The industrial revolution forever altered the fabric of American culture. The only activities that are worth anything in the American marketplace are ones that contribute to material and financial progress. Case in point: peruse the employment possibilities in your city. Engineers can name their own salary. Poets, artists, musicians? Typically no more than $30 a year (in the case of a graphic artist working for a major firm), and, more often, starving for $150 per poem, in the case of the writer. Ministers of our spiritual health? They are paid almost nothing. Attorneys and physicians? Six figures. The composer who pens the song that transports you back in time to your first kiss, or the artist whose brush-strokes cause you to remember how much you love your father? Well, hopefully they have a day job to support themselves by doing something “important.”

Certainly, there are exceptions (although most popular culture icons sacrificed their artistic integrity to make money long ago). As a rule, however, I think we’ve gotten our priorities inverted, here. Why can assisting in the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual journeys of individuals not be a prized vocation in society? Why do the most important positions in society suffer from an inability to “make a living” doing what they love to do? Instead, the deep thinker, unless fortunate enough to acquire an academic position, is forced to toil away at a maddening job that prohibits him/her from doing what they love, what is important.

I can identify other areas where our culture has made this error. We’ve created a need for lawyers, so we make them wealthy, while our teachers and police officers (who should be wealthy for what they do) barely make ends meet.

And the contemplative artist? Well, she is dismissed as almost irrelevant, fighting to warn the rest of us what lies ahead as she desperately writes, dances, paints, sings, or sculpts her vision of the mechanical society we may already be doomed to become.

Karen and I are reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking On Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. L’Engle comes up with some interesting points, but one of the most intriguing for me in the first two chapters is the idea that miraculous events no longer take place because we no longer have a child-like faith.

I’ve heard theologians argue why there are no longer overt miracles such as there were when Christ was physically among us, and I’ve seen this become an enormous obstacle to belief for many. Certainly we wonder why, if these amazingly supernatural things occurred in the time of the ancients, they no longer take place. Ted Dekker poses a similar question in Showdown: adults prove woefully inept to harness the supernatural power given to them, but children can exercise it at will.

I’ve worked with many cases of psychosis in the past. I’ve found myself wondering at times if psychiatric dysfunction is an accurate diagnosis of the problem, or if something far more sinister is at work. All of us, whether or not we claim to be Christ-followers, have experienced the supernatural realm at some point, at some level, whether obvious or subtle. So, I wonder if miracles don’t occur around us daily, and perhaps we’ve just gotten really good at explaining them away?

I’m not disregarding science or digressing into the realm of nouthetic stupidity, but perhaps, just perhaps, we’ve analyzed a bit too much, and we’ve reached conclusions that make too much sense to us too often.

Perhaps it isn’t intended to make that much sense.

Perhaps it’s more obvious than we think?

And if it is, and if we can’t perceive these miracles, is it because our faith has been usurped by a love for empirical data, a passionate desire to be able to cross-reference every experience to a natural phenomenon that we can understand? After all, we’re afraid of what we don’t understand.

Has our fear over-ridden our faith?

I’ve written about this before, but I had a great conversation with a friend last night about this, and so I had to share today.

There’s this ageless debate about whether art imitates life, or life imitates art. Do children become more violent after playing violent video games, or watching violent movies? Or are these artistic portrayals that are reflecting the state of our culture? Can we blame artistic expression for our societal woes? Should we enforce limits on artistic expression in order to assure our safety?

The debate last night specifically came from discussing the television show, Sex and the City. The show is extremely suggestive, even in it’s primetime incarnation. Would I feel comfortable letting my (future) children watch it? No. I recognize, however, that some of the dialogue is very well-written. The conversation became, though, when did television begin to permit this type of material to become viewable? I remember when Married With Children became a hotly debated television show during my freshman year in college. Later, it was the Simpsons. Ironically, for all of the debate that surrounded the Simpsons, and now South Park, both offer (not with every episode, but in general) very true commentary about our society. These are artistic portrayals of our culture. Edgy portrayals, and accurate.

The same principle holds true with hip-hop culture. I loved rap during college. I find rap today less inviting. However, you can trace the content of rap changing dramatically from “old school” Run DMC, to Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” to the development of “gangsta rap.” I’ve come to the conclusion that I dislike modern rap more because the violent urban culture it reflects has become less inviting. However, my friend thinks that it has contributed to the cultural shift. Having lived in L.A. several years ago, he said that the “gangster” phenomenon was squashed until rappers began rapping about it, and then a resurgance occurred.

Having never lived in L.A., I can’t offer any knowledge on that. But if there is a cycle that occurs, I think it happens because we as a culture, and as various sub-cultures, have to look into the mirror that artistic expressions provide. Paul TIllich, articulating his theology of art, claims that artists are gifted with the foresight to recognize societal problems, and the calling to state them. Artists, writers, and musicians are the first to recognize or predict cultural crises, and place them in the public eye. I agree with this. I think that art imitates life. I’m not ruling out that the reverse can happen, but I think it is the exception rather than the rule. Our culture has become gripped be increasing angst, and so has our art and musical expression. This can be seen in the migration from “old-school” rap to “gangsta” rap, and from “heavy metal” to “hard-core” rock.

Scripture performs the same function more authoritatively, but we all too frequently ignore the warnings from both.

“For if you listen to the word and don’t obey, it is like glancing at your face in a mirror,” James warns. “You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like”(James 1:23-24, NLT).

Perhaps, instead of attempting to censor Scripture and the arts so passionately, we as a society should attempt to see the warnings which they present. An even more radical thought? Perhaps we should even heed those warnings.

Have you ever noticed how all those movies about amazing life changing teachers are always stories about people who buck the system? Why can’t I be one of those people? Now, granted most of those films have been time compressed, so that what you get to taste in your living room is usually the result of work done by an individual over several years, such as Jaime Escalante, a man who taught inner city rejects how to do college level math–his program was developed over about ten years. The teacher in Dangerous Minds has also had a long and arduous career in education learning how reach her inner city students. The latest film out, Freedom Writers, looks to be of the same nature as its predecessors, though set on the west coast this time. And there are so many others, all with one thing in common: they truly teach by bucking the system.

As a fairly inexperienced teacher driven by test scores and “No Child Left Behind” legislation, I am frustrated that I can’t be one of those “buck the system” types. I believe that the irony of these films, based on the True success stories of teachers throughout history, is the key to real learning. Many of these films have inspired my pursuit, and others, of a place in the field, and yet in reality the pressures to conform to a curriculum that pushes students through leaving an almost one room schoolhouse feel in every classroom–except that each student is roughly the same age chronologically, is nothing short of death to the true teacher.

And it seems that on top of all this bucking the system is the sense that these methods are most successful in the inner city. How does one effectively and truly teach the students in between. The county school systems, where students are from the farm, to students from small city low-income housing areas, and everyone in between, are all in one room.

I daily witness the same hateful prejudice, which permeates the schools of the inner city. But there are so many forms, so many guises which this intangible thing takes on. It appears that the most recent teacher to come to the silver screen discovered that this was the issue she had to first address, before any standard curriculum could be learned by her students. I wish that I could buck the system somehow. That I could confront my students with their petty and unreasonable hate for one another. But I am stuck presenting boring information to an apathetic group of beings who would choose not to be there if they could. How do I buck the system safely, acceptably, in a way that will not shake or ruffle the person who could have me fired?

I want to. But I don’t think I can.