The Cultural Elite are No More!

Posted on December 21, 2007

A UK study claims that the cultural elite are no more, the kind of people who prefer high culture over pop culture: “We find little evidence for the existence of a cultural elite who would consume ‘high’ culture while shunning more ‘popular’ cultural forms.

This study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, included the US in its study dividing people into four groups: univores, omnivores, paucivores, and inactives.

  • Univores: only like popular culture
  • Omnivores: like everything from opera to soap opera
  • Paucivores: (taken from “paucity”?): absorb very little culture
  • Inactives: absorb practically none.

Researchers concluded that social status, from vocation, not social class, from wealth or birth, are more determinative for cultural taste and preference. They also concluded that cultural elitist are no more, that at most we are omnivores, a kind of cultural eclectic. You you agree? Which category would you claim, if any?

BONO on CHRISTMAS

Posted on December 20, 2007

I posted this last year and found it just as reflective and awe-inspiring as last year…

This reflection on Christmas occurred after Bono had just returned home, to Dublin, from a long tour with U2. On Christmas Eve Bono went to the famous St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Jonathan Swift was dean. Apparently he was given a really poor seat, one obstructed by a pillar, making it even more difficult for him to keep his eyes open…but it was there that Christmas story struck him like never before. He writes:

“The idea that God, if there is a force of Logic and Love in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw…a child… I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this.”

Isn’t it compelling? The logic and love of a personal God revealing himself, accounting for our person-ality, our propensity to love. And oh, the mercy of God, born in shit and straw, to rescue us from ourselves, our godless gift-giving, and our arrogant disregard for God and for others so that we might know and enjoy him and his new creation forever. And that he, the infinite God, would do it in Christ, in time, in space, in confounding condescension to pivot the course of the entire creation project from despair, destruction, and dereliction to a hopeful, whole, and happy future.

Will you ponder the poetry of Christmas this year, the genius of the incarnation? What obstructions are in your path to dwelling on the vulnerable, inexhaustible power and love of God in Christ? Renounce them and rivet your attention on the Christ.

Excerpt taken from Bono: in conversation (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 124-5.

Communion with the Triune God

Posted on December 19, 2007

John Owen has long been a holy influence on my life and thought. His Mortification of Sin has profoundly influenced my approach to fighting personal sin. The recent release of Communion with the Triune God has afforded me yet another delightful plunge into this Puritan divine’s comprehension of God and how we have been created to communion with him.

Though the entire book is too lengthy to cover in detail, I will offer some highlights from my reading.

Did the OT Saints Commune with the Triune God?

In chapter one, Owen clearly lays out that communion with God is the sweetest relationship possible, better than “any friendship” and possible only through Jesus. Remarking on the difference between the communion with the Trinity as presented in the Old and New testaments, Owen comments: “The thing itself is found there; but the clear light of it, and the boldness of faith in it, is discovered in the gospel, and by the Spirit administered therein” (91). Thus, communion with the Triune God is sharpened and enabled by the gospel of Christ administered by the Spirit. But what of Moses, David, and Solomon? Did they not commune with the triune God? Owen remarks: “Though they had communion with God, yet they had not parrēsian—a boldness and confidence in that communion.”

What is Communion (with God)?

his communication of himself unto us,
with our return unto him of that which he requires and accepts,
flowing from that union which in Jesus Christ we have with him.

in a affection-stirring summary Owen writes:

It is, then, I say, of that mutual communication30 in giving and receiving,
after a most holy and spiritual manner, which is between God and
the saints while they walk together in a covenant of peace, ratified in
the blood of Jesus, whereof we are to treat. And this we shall do, if God
permit; in the meantime praying the God and Father of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ—who has, of the riches of his grace, recovered us
from a state of enmity into a condition of communion and fellowship
with himself—that both he that writes, and they that read the words
of his mercy, may have such a taste of his sweetness and excellencies
therein, as to be stirred up to a further longing after the fullness of his
salvation and the eternal fruition of him in glory.

Slums are Good for Cities?

Posted on December 19, 2007

In “Bright Lights, Big Cities” Matthew Quirk argues for the goodness of burgeoning urban slums. Contrary to intuition, slums, shantytowns, and squatter settlements reduce national poverty. Quirk points out that sixty-six percent of the migrants who move from rural to urban contexts make more money. Yet doesn’t it take more money to live in (or just outside) the city?

In its “State of World Population 2007” report, the UN points out that since the 1990s, perhaps 10 percent of the poverty reduction achieved by developing countries has been the result of migration from the countryside. As a result, Quirk argues that cities should simply try to improve the standard of living in tenements, instead of trying to do away of them. What do you think?