Category Archives: Faith and Culture

Enjoyment, Experience, and Reading

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Stephen Swanson

Stephen Swanson, prompted by a recent colleague’s sharing of the “Read a Book” rap and expressing a desire to show it to their students.  Without getting into issues of race and class, what is the problem with the “reading issue” a bit more broadly?

Nothing New…

There’s nothing new about a general frustration of an older generation of educators complaining about the lack of preparation of the future generation and a fear of a disappearance of books or quality books or the right books, and so on.  It seems that every year a cycle of e-mails make the teaching rounds of century-old quotes that sound just like our feelings of today.

It’s Not that I Don’t Like to Read, but…

What I’ve noticed might be changing is that while my students (both young and old) have less experience reading things on their own, they often express a desire to read more and learn to read for pleasure.

In fact, this week, one of my lit students commented during break, “I really like how we are thinking differently about this book, but I also wish that we could take time to enjoy it.  I don’t even know how to do that anymore.”  At first, my hackles raised, and I wanted to reply, “Well, that’s because you’re learning to REALLY look into a book and figure out how it means.”  Fortunately, I stopped myself and thought for a second.

Why shouldn’t we take time to teach/give credit for reading just for enrichment or pleasure?

Part of it is probably because the people teaching are often the one’s who already love reading and take that as a given.  As can be seen by the launch of the iPad, an understanding of contemporary society must take on the growing assumption that things should “fit me”.  On a certain level, this is pure hubris and entitlement, but “it is what it is”, as they say.  Like it or not, people have less time for traditional “reading” and when one is not introduced to reading very early in life (Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone advocates that an interest in books should happen in the first 3 years), then where else will you get it?

It’s Important, Really, but Don’t Make It Too Important.

An NEA study from 2007 found all the usual suspects.  Reading is falling, and it is becoming more important for work.  However, what really gave me pause when this student asked her question was that the immediate assumption that emerged that one must justify reading in terms of educational, and primarily economic, reasons.

Would reading really not be something to teach if it only offered another way of enjoying oneself and connecting to other people, ideas, times, and places?  Looking at the books and movies selected for awards or even just for small, local book groups, one would assume that loving books means loving stories about the deaths of young girls, loss of innocence, or big, historical epics.

In writing this, I’ve often devolved into a screed against the focus on quantitative educational goals, but I need to keep deleting them and move on to the bigger points.  Reading is more than enjoyment, as I teach in my literature and rhetoric classes.  Reading is also more than analysis and critique, which is not really taught or encouraged anywhere, and I think it needs to be.

Why Can’t I Stop Being Serious?

I’ll give you a personal example of how difficult this is for me to accomplish.  A couple weeks ago, I was meeting a friend at my favorite bar, and I brought in the genre novel that I was reading at the time (Bounty-hunter Witch Lives with Vampire and Struggles for Her Identity).  After a while of sitting at the bar, a patron asked me, “What are you reading?”  I turned the cover so that she could read the title and author.  She inquired, “What’s it about?” “Well,…[confused retelling of backstory],” and I immediately felt the need to point out, “Well, I study genre narratives, especially those about detectives and detective-like characters, and especially about individual morality and ethics.”

Immediately after the addendum, she smiled and said, “Cool.  That’s awesome that you study something that you love.”  It was to this moment that my mind jumped just this last week when the student asked about reading for pleasure.  I do love the literature that I teach, well most of it, but I’ve loved it for so long that I forget what it is like to learn to love something.  That “learning to love” is a slow process, just ask my wife about onions, but it is a worthwhile process to learn, just ask my wife about onions.  It is something worth putting some time, effort, and reward into sharing with others, if for society in general, then at least for individual, selfish reasons.   While I am loath to say it, learning to love something might even prove useful for one’s future life and career, but don’t tell anyone I said so.

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Stephen Swanson teaches as an assistant professor of English at McLennan Community College. Aside from guiding students through the pitfalls of college writing and literature, he spends most of his time trying to remain  aware of popular culture, cooking, and enjoying time with his wife and son. He holds degrees in Communications (Calvin College), Film Studies (Central Michigan University), and Media and American Culture Studies (Bowling Green State University. In addition to editing a collection, Battleground States: Scholarship in Contemporary America, he has forthcoming projects on Johnny Cash and depiction of ethics in detective narratives.

Sightings

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1983: In the third grade, my religion teacher, Mrs. Brandstetter, tells me a story during Tuesday night CCD class about a  woman in Mexico whose taco meat, after falling out of her tortilla at lunch, miraculously formed itself into a silhouette of the Virgin Mary. The image my young mind instantly created: small individual crumbly rounds of ground beef mysteriously and reverently moving themselves across a piece of Mexican hand-painted ceramic ware, one grainy chunk of meat at a time coalescing into feet, a robe, veil, nose and eyes.

On the side table by the couch in the living room of my childhood, a small, engraved photo album. On the first page, a photograph of oil-stained window panels on an office building in Clearwater , Florida, that looked remarkably like a profile of the Blessed Virgin. A miracle on display wasn’t at all strange to my devoutly Catholic and generally superstitious family—why shouldn’t heaven and earth somewhere converge?

Once a year, we made it a family pilgrimage to gather with hundreds of people at the Holy Spirit Center just off the Norwood lateral about twenty minutes from our house to say the Rosary from lawn chairs on a hill while waiting for Our Lady of Light to make her midnight appearance.

Skeptic’s Dictionary: Apophenia (n): the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data, the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.” May be linked to psychosis or creativity.

2005: Hundreds gather at the Fullerton Avenue underpass on the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago. They’ve come to see the Virgin Mary in the salt run-off. That same year, a pregnant couple sees the face of Jesus during their ultrasound at a hospital in Toledo. A concession clerk sees him in a nacho pan. He also appeared on the tinted windows at a hardware store in Rio Grande Valley, Texas, and, shortly before that, in a pecan tree to a Louisiana man who was barbecuing in his backyard.

We are programmed, Carl Sagan says, born with a propensity to identify the human face. It’s for evolution’s sake, so that we can make out faces from a distance using only minimal details. This is why we can recognize faces before putting in our contacts in the morning.

At the stroke of twelve, church bells rang, cameras flashed, we waited and waited.

But I saw nothing.

Type I Psychological error: (false positive, false alarm, caused by an excess in sensitivity): Often used as an explanation of some paranormal and religious claims, and can also be used to explain the tendency of humans to believe pseudoscience.

I saw nothing but the moon.

I saw nothing but the moon hanging heavy in the sky, so full that it made a glow behind the backs of the pine trees on the horizon.

*          *          *

Michelle Metcalf does believe in miracles, especially moonlight illuminating the trees. She lives in Cincinnati, OH and sometimes still prays Hail Marys out of habit, even though she is no longer a practicing Catholic.

The Psalms as Poetry

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Heather Cadenhead

Heather Cadenhead unravels Psalm 77 and looks closely for the all of the great poetic bits within it.  She also examines her own personal poetry for the same “beautiful truth” she has found in the psalmists verses.


The first time I heard someone refer to the Psalms as a book of poetry, I was considerably moved.  As a creative writer living under the grace of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the idea of God speaking to me through a book of poems was an altogether beautiful notion.  I imagine that it’s the same sort of feeling that Johan Huibers, a Dutch contractor, got when he was able to recreate Noah’s ark using the exact measurements given in the Old Testament.  There is a sense of wonder in meshing God’s perfect truth with the things we most love to make with our hands, whether that is something functional like an ark or aesthetic like a poem.

As of late, I’ve loved the poetry in Psalm 77 because it seamlessly weaves together three elements of poetry that I believe to be crucial to any completed work of verse.

  • It uses metaphor skillfully: “The waters saw You, O God; / The waters saw You, they were afraid; / The depths also trembled” (Psalm 77:16, NKJV).  Water, as an inhuman thing, cannot feel the human emotion of fear; however, water is at the mercy of God’s hand.  Knowledge of God’s mercy over us creates a fear of the Lord, making the line “The waters saw You, they were afraid” an appropriate and beautiful metaphor.
  • It uses beautiful imagery and shows a strong command of language: “Your way was in the sea, / Your path in the great waters, / And Your footsteps were not known” (Psalm 77:19, NKJV).  The sea imagery here is not only lovely, but succinct: the Psalmist’s verse isn’t wordy and he doesn’t use unnecessary adjectives or adverbs. In fact, the only adjective in this verse is the word “great” to describe “waters.”  The phrase “great waters” serves as a synonym for “sea” here. So, the adjective isn’t meant to be flowery.  It’s a necessary description.
  • It conveys truth in a chilling way: “Your path was in the great waters, / And Your footsteps were not known” (Psalm 77:19b, NKJV).  I discussed this verse in the last point, while talking about imagery, but it also conveys a bone-rattling truth: God can perform the greatest of miracles without even being seen.  If He chooses, He may roam the sea without leaving a single footprint. It’s an entirely chilling and beautiful truth conveyed skillfully in the Psalmist’s verse.

As a Christian writer, my goal should be to write beautiful truth. By beautiful, I don’t mean to imply that our poems should read like textual versions of Thomas Kinkade paintings.  Far from it.  I mean that we should write poems that sound good; we ought to choose strong words (not necessarily concrete words over abstract words, but concrete words to convey abstract ideas).  A well-written poem is, to me, a beautiful poem. It isn’t related to the content. Psalm 77, in fact, has a few bleak moments: “Has His mercy ceased forever? / Has His promise failed forevermore?” (Psalm 77:8, NKJV).  It has moments that stop you dead in your tracks: “I remembered God, and was troubled; / I complained, and my spirit was overwhelmed” (Psalm 77:3, NKJV).

By truth, I mean that our poems as Christians should convey what is true, what is real.  In Psalm 77, I find two truths: one is the truth of man’s frailty (“My hand was stretched out in the night without ceasing; / My soul refused to be comforted” [Psalm 77:2b, NKJV]); the other is the truth of God’s sovereign grace (“Your way, O God, is in the sanctuary; / Who is so great a God as our God?” [Psalm 77:13, NKJV]).

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Heather Cadenhead’s poems “Embalming” and “Bone Collection” were published in Relief Issue 3.2.  Her work has been featured in Illuminations, Arbor Vitae, The Ampersand Review, Boston Literary Magazine, and other publications.  She recently won the Editor’s Prize for an upcoming issue of New Plains Review.  Heather lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, with her husband, Tyson, and their dog, Arthur.  She is the senior editor of The Basilica Review.

The Intersection of Faith and Art

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Jeanne Damoff joins the blog as a guest looking into the union of Faith and Art.

When Chris Fisher first suggested I write a guest post for Relief, I asked if he had a topic in mind. He said, “Anything you want, really. Some kind of faith/art angle would be good.”

(Aside: I wanted to insert an “angle” joke here–maybe something about my being too “obtuse” to understand what he wanted–but I couldn’t come up with wording I liked. Feel free to give it a shot. And remember, if you make me laugh, you’ll earn valuable points.)

As I pondered what I might write, the phrase that kept coming to mind was “the intersection of faith and art.” The more I thought about it, the more I liked the images that phrase conjured. An intersection is a place where two distinct things collide or cross and, for a defined space, become one. Where any two roads intersect, that square of pavement is as much one as it is the other. My perception of it depends entirely on the direction I’m heading.

Who Are You?

Suppose you’re creating a personal profile for some networking site, and you’re given the prompt, “I am a ___________.” Most of us could answer that question in numerous ways. Relationally, I am a wife, mom, daughter, friend, aunt, mother-in-law, etc. Vocationally, I am a writer, speaker, musician, choreographer, photographer. Philosophically, I am a Christian, a creature, an eternal soul. I’m also a cook, maid, laundress. Mentor, counselor, confidante. Fitness nut, dancing fool, laugh-aholic. You get the idea. But what if I have to prioritize? Which identity should come first?
I have no problem with folks who choose the Sunday School answer. But I also have no problem believing faith can be as much a part of a person as their humanity, and as such, needs no name tag. Perhaps I’m an artist who recognizes my gifts are just that–gifts. They were given to me by One who delights in my embracing and using them, and I delight in being who I was created to be. To call myself “Artist” is to accept my Creator’s design for my life and therefore one of the highest compliments I can give Him. To insist that I always use the “Christian” qualifier–or, for that matter, that all my art deals with overtly Christian subject matter–is to greatly limit the scope of the gift.

I’m going to assume that many of this blog’s readers consider themselves both Christians and artists. I also assume you’ve most likely encountered some incarnation of the “Christian artist” or “Artist who happens to be a Christian” debate. Some folks get their bloomers in a pretty tight wad over this, but I can’t help wondering if it ultimately boils down to which road you’re driving on when the two collide. And does it even matter? Either way, the intersection makes them one.

Where do Faith and Art Intersect?

Main Street and First Avenue intersect in cities and towns all over the world. Likewise, the intersection of Faith and Art is found everywhere. And, if you’re like me, it often sneaks up on you. You may be worshiping God with no thought to your art, when a glimpse of His goodness, mercy, intimacy, or grace inspires you to create. Or you may be playing the piano, photographing nature, ballet dancing, or painting a portrait of your child, when suddenly God feels nearer to you than you ever thought possible.

Those times may take us by surprise, but they’re not particularly surprising. Wherever beauty is found, faith and art commonly intersect. But sometimes the two collide in unexpected places.

Sorrow.

Injustice.

Tragedy.

Betrayal.

Faith is stretched to its limits, and art seeks to understand.

Art depicts darkness, and faith cries out to God in response.

These intersections can be full of potholes and blockades. The way is slippery, steep, and full of shadows. When we finally come out on the other side, we’re older and wiser. Our faith purified. Our art refined.

It makes no difference if we approach the intersection on Artist Avenue or Faith Lane. Once we enter it, the two become one. And that’s where the magic happens. Whoever you are and whatever identity you claim, I hope your road leads you to that intersection again and again. I hope the same for me.

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Jeanne Damoff is the author of Parting the Waters: A True Story: Finding Beauty in Brokenness and her work can also be found in Relief Number 2.  You can visit her website at jeannedamoff.com and her blog at jeannedamoff.wordpress.com.

A Tough Few Months for Populists: The Loss of Howard Zinn and Ray Browne

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Stephen Swanson

Stephen Swanson departs from initial post on the meaning of “union” and various queries into whether it has “a state” regardless of speeches in order to highlight the passing of some ones who have been vitally important in shaping his beliefs about voice, art, and culture: Ray Browne and Howard Zinn.

The losses of Ray Browne, who died last October, and Howard Zinn, who died on Wednesday, provide me with a chance to write something that’s been on my mind for three months. Zinn and Browne shared a view of America starting at the bottom and working up, rather than the more traditional top-down. It’s so often that we highlight the fastest, biggest, richest, most beautiful, and most powerful things as the best, but these men made their lives’ work emphasizing the popular, average, and normal, and turning those words in assets not reasons for derision.

Ray Browne, it’s Ok to Study the Popular…

Calling Browne the founder of popular culture is a misnomer. People have been interested in and examined popular things for some time, but Browne, at least in the American academic system, pushed for the acceptance and respect for popular culture in academics and criticism. For example, his book on Lincoln, Lincoln-Lore: Lincoln in the Popular Mind, argues that understanding Abraham Lincoln as a literal, real person limits the citizen’s understanding of the role that Lincoln has come to hold in American minds, words, and ideals. And that one must examine thing of Lincoln that reach beyond facts and words of him as a man. His work and the works of those who he influenced have spread to the point to almost make what was once unthinkable, almost normal, that we can and should think about our common world and the things we “like” as a part of our intellectual lives.

Howard Zinn, We Must Listen to the Popular…

I am in no way the most devoted to Zinn of my friends, in fact one of my cohort literally made the movie, and so must leave detailed discussions to them. In almost everything Zinn wrote over the past 30-plus years, he emphasizes the need for citizens of America to seek out and actively listen to the voices of the average Americans from throughout our history and through all points on the political spectrum. During the times of my post-secondary education (1997-2007), American popular culture has trended toward the assumption of a nearly blind acceptance of authority that we agree with and rejection of those with whom our beliefs conflict. This period has shown increased reliance on pundit/mediators to break down and keep the gates of our physical, intellectual and spiritual lives, and regardless of whether one agrees with Zinn’s politics, the need for a citizenry to educate themselves on the realities of our collective histories and current place presses on my mind daily as I encounter students with huge gaps in the most basic geographical, historical, and cultural knowledge necessary to make even basic political opinions.

To Me…

The underlying assumptions in Browne and Zinn’s works revolve around a respect and need to understand those that have been labeled mundane or ordinary. These days it grows harder and harder to convince my students, and even my peers, that they have something worthwhile to learn, consider, evaluate, and express, and that they should not also look to the simple or obvious sources for these knowledges but should dig deeply and sift carefully, testing themselves and their environments throughout their daily lives and into their futures.

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Stephen Swanson teaches as an assistant professor of English at McLennan Community College. Aside from guiding students through the pitfalls of college writing and literature, he spends most of his time trying to remain  aware of popular culture, cooking, and enjoying time with his wife and son. He holds degrees in Communications (Calvin College), Film Studies (Central Michigan University), and Media and American Culture Studies (Bowling Green State University. In addition to editing a collection, Battleground States: Scholarship in Contemporary America, he has forthcoming projects on Johnny Cash and depiction of ethics in contemporary film noir.