Sunday, August 28, 2016

It has really been a rough week.  I can tell that I’m emotionally drained because my reactions to others are about as whiny and huffy as Selah June’s when she doesn’t get exactly what she wants.  I feel like all of my emotional intelligence checked out somewhere along the way this week, and what’s left is just moody mess…  Maybe that should be a word.  Building on moodiness, we should describe the result as moodimess.

I ordered a few books a week ago, and two of them arrived the other day.  One of them is super interesting.  It’s’ called A Theology of the Built Environment.  It’s by a theologian who certainly knows his stuff about the liberal arts.  His writing draws from philosophy, history, architecture, art, and anthropology.

Tim Gorringe, the author, is blowing my mind.  Here is just one little quote: ” For Paul the temple is not a building but the community living in the world.  There cannot, therefore, be an idea of the profane as the sum total of common life outside the sphere of the holy.” What??  He is taking on the polarity of our language and our understanding as private/public and sacred/secular.  Here is more.  “If Eliade’s two realms mean the de-sanctification of the everyday then the implications of secularization, by contrast, as Richard Niebuhr rightly observed, is the sanctification of all things.  What we learn from Scripture is that every day is the day that the Lord has made; every nation is a holy people called by him into existence in its place and time and to his glory; every person is sacred, made in his image and likeness.”

I’ve often tried to articulate my motivation for studying the varied subjects of democracy, community, architecture, public space, and civic engagement.  Right now particularly I’m thinking through this question because I’m at the end of one major project and charting my course for the next one.  What do I want to read?  What do I want to explore?  What might I have to write?  Everything I have produced so far has stemmed from personal experience coupled with real world observation and scientific inquiry.  I don’t anticipate that the next project will be any different, but my experiences are shifting.  I now experience everything as a mother of a very small child.  The questions attracting me at the moment involve the rhetorical statements of children’s television shows and movies, the value and sustainability of an early-education model that pre-supposes a single-income family structure, or the potential impact of new technology on parent-child attachment and children’s emotional and social development.  Those are obviously nowhere near my academic training.

Even now, I really see space for work that identifies the core values, the foundational infrastructure, and the communal activities that undergird democratic life.  I don’t know that democracy is inherently a good thing, but I know that we assume that it is.  I think that we make design choices that shape our built environment and that environment then houses our community activities.  I know that we have had major shifts in individual (and societal) behavior driven by emerging digital technologies.  We have no idea how these will impact our relationships and our longterm psychological health.  What might these changes bring about for our political lives — at the level of the street, the neighborhood, the city, the state, and the nation?  I think that’s where my head is right now.

Selah June’s been taking a good afternoon nap, so I actually have had 15 minutes to read and think.