In lieu of Chapter 6

A personal commentary on Chapter 6 of Ken Myers's All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes is not forthcoming anytime soon. And since both Wednesday and Friday promise all-day outings, I'm not sure Chapter 7 is in the works for this week, either.  In fact, I seem to have overloaded my brain to the extent that I need to take a deep breath and straighten out some of the tangle that's in there already. That happens from time to time.  So I'm cooking instead.

Regarding Chapter 6, I attempted in two different drafts to write something more than a mere synopsis of the chapter, whose subject is how pop culture and the liberal arts are not just different tastes, but different experiences altogether. And both times, even though I clearly stated the difference between quality of thought issues and salvation issues, I ended up feeling as though I were personally critiquing my fellow Christians.  Moral of story:  I suppose it doesn't work for the neighborhood Luddite to preach on the mental advantages of turning off pop culture, no matter how wonderful, or even important, those advantages may be to said Luddite.  

In my state of mental knottedness, however, I did discover a young writer, Matthew B. Crawford, who seems to have a gift for making many of the same points I would like to make if I were half so talented as he at writing insightfully (a big if!).  It probably helps that he isn't trying to make an appeal to Christians, but to young people generally, particularly college students.  That way, there's no question of any implications in his appeals for acceptance by God.  With Myers, it's much harder to separate the two.

Here's a sample of Crawford talking about the importance of liberal education, echoing what Myers (via C.S. Lewis) calls receiving a work, which an requires effort to see beyond one's limited perspective, as opposed to using it:

The humanities might be understood simply as s record of the best that has been thought about the human situation. Acquaintance with this record has the effect of freeing us from the present, with its necessarily partial view, and opening us up to the full range of human possibilities. Further, to enter truly into the great works of the past, or of other cultures, requires an effort to free oneself from the present and its certainties. A cultivated willingness to make that effort is perhaps the cardinal intellectual virtue.

That is an excellent summary of Chapter 6, with the exception that Myers postulates that for Christians, our imprisonment in the psychological familiarity and present-orientation of pop culture may make it harder for us to grow not only intellectually, but spiritually as well.

I found Mr. Crawford via Rick Saenz of Dry Creek Chronicles, who in turn found him on Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons blog.  After reading the linked article, Shop Class as Soulcraft (which will be published as a full-length book in May), I was so enthused that I Googled several other articles by Mr. Matthews, all equally enjoyable. Though he writes on everything from physics textbooks to mood medication on campus, the common thread is always the destructive effect of modern society on the liberal arts.  And that's a subject I could read about all day.  

So, for Chapter 6, I suppose my comments will be limited to:  1) Instead of reading Myers, go ahead and read An Experiment in Criticism, the excellent C.S. Lewis book on which most of the chapter is based, and 2) print out a few articles by Matthew B. Crawford and read them when you have time.  Among the current mass of internet articles, they stand out as well worth our attention.