Less Chefs, More Cooks
As the new year is upon us and I begin to transition Tribute into more of a collaborative blog, a handful of inquiries have been raised by friends and readers and I believe them to be worth addressing. I can reduce them to two primary questions: What do you mean by Reformed Catholicity? and Why locally source content that could be done better by professionals? Let’s start with the latter and in another article in the near future, we will address Reformed Catholicity.
Boniface House was created in order for Matt Corey and me to work with other contributors in the task of encouraging Mainers to be theologically shaped by the work of other Mainers. This was not meant to be a statement about the Church needing an identity that is linked to a region or not. This is an important conversation in its own right and one that will thrust the inquisitor into the sharp and interesting arguments of folks like Kuyper, Schilder, and even T.S. Eliot, all who weighed in with determined thoughtfulness on this issue; however, our reason for locally sourcing theological content from Mainers is to bring a sense of Biblical saturation to a regional fabric. We are in Maine and we love Maine. We desire to see Maine brimming with deeper and wider streams of Biblical culture and we believe that this is the task of Mainers empowered by the Holy Spirit. But why can’t Mainers simply download content from international professionals?
As I’ve talked to students over the years about the arts, one of the things that has become obvious is that mainstream media and their expressed value system are not simply one of the many influences contributing to the mosaic of their identities. Mainstream media and their expressed value system are enormously responsible for hardware and software formation. Music, for example, is widely seen as a thing that one does only if one is exceptional at it. The tall order includes not only the capacity to sell albums and be liked but to be beautiful. One does not sing anymore simply because one loves to sing. One does not even sing anymore because one is gifted. One sings if one has a chance to be famous doing it. That’s it. This has not emerged in the vacuous absence of positive self-imaging messages. Positive self-imaging messages abound. Boys can be girls if they want to be. Girls can be bears if they want to be. Sixth place contestants can identify as first place contestants and on and on the tragedy goes. One would think with such affirmation, the whole world would be singing. They aren’t, however, because commodification is the implicit storyteller in this tale. Music has migrated from being the possession of the human race into being a possession of the ruling elites. In capitalism, all things are commodified, including the acts of making and listening. The same thing has happened to food.
I’ve mentioned in a previous article how the early 20th-century food critic, M. F. K. Fisher, once lamented the rising popularity of cookbooks, arguing that it would inevitably distract people from actually cooking food for people to eat, which is supposed to be the human’s primary relationship with food. One does not cook anymore because one loves food or loves to feed people. You get the idea.
I’ve read a number of professional chefs say that on any given day they would rather be eating in a family kitchen than in a cutting edge restaurant. Part of this, undoubtedly, has to do with the fact that no matter how successful a restaurant is at developing a believable aesthetic, it is and will always be what Orwell describes as simulated hospitality. Being invited to sit at someone’s table without the opportunity to pay for your part in the event is non-simulated hospitality. This dividing line makes the border between the events uncrossable. There is no question that the possibility is greater for one to be served an objectively better dish of duck confit at Balthazar than one would be at one’s next-door neighbor’s apartment . . . but if it is true that the event of non-simulated hospitality is inaccessible to the commercial kitchen then a strong argument can be made, should be made, and is made, that friends ought to make friends duck confit regardless of the end product being incomparable to that which can be found at Balthazar. Anthony Bourdain used to argue that the world has too many chefs and not enough cooks. With that in mind, we are attempting to locally source theological content for Mainers, by Mainers. Chefs are welcome to apply, but we are looking for cooks.
It’s also important to keep in mind that Big Eva does not produce theological content strictly for the edification of the Church. After all, everybody’s got to eat. Target audiences are kept in mind during the editing process and contracts are framed in light of prospective demographics being reached and profits per unit numbers being met.
But it’s not just money. The intended audience shapes the way the communicator speaks and the way in which one speaks is inextricably tied to the content, not strictly as a medium, but as content itself. As one begins to acquire increased specification of an audience, the entirety of the content (medium included) begins to take on a different shape. If I am writing an Amazon review for a flashlight I purchased, my audience is more anonymous (although not completely anonymous) than if I was writing an announcement in my church’s bulletin. The bulletin announcement, however, is more anonymous than a letter to my wife. As we increase audience specificity, especially in space, we decrease the need for mediation, thusly getting closer and closer to something like an event of primary orality. As we increase mediated anonymity, we get further and further from it. This is only one aspect of why there is strength in the development of content by and for a specified region, but it is a significant and weighty aspect.
When I first quit the band Tree by Leaf and was learning how to be a Christian and think properly about art and everything else I remember going to an open mic and listening to a father and his daughter perform a cover version of Jolene by Dolly Parton. I was blown away, not because I had come upon an undiscovered gem of vocal prowess, but because this guy and his kid had worked for hours in order to memorize lyrics, learn the harmony part, practice in order to mitigate the nervousness, and then put it out there during a 5-minute slot at a local coffeehouse. A couple of people clapped. The other couple of people didn’t. No networking. No letting people know they had CDs for sale in the lobby. No one coming up and asking why nobody has heard of them. Just a dad and his daughter having a blast doing what they had set out to do, offer up a technically inferior version of something someone else had technically done better. But in the course of this song, I was learning to move from the commercial kitchen into the family kitchen.
The vision of Tribute is: Gospel, externalized and made explicit. This idea comes from Henry Van Til’s definition of culture being “religion, externalized and made explicit.” All culture is religious conviction manifesting itself in the material realm. A mural painted by a nihilist will most likely show it in some way; so should a driveway of snow shoveled by a Christian.
This is deeply Reformational. Schaeffer would use the Dutch Reformed Painters as clear examples of this thinking. With a theological grounding in the Gospel, rightly understood, the workday would not only be approached differently by the laborers but it would be represented accordingly in the perspective of the artist. The Reformation had not necessarily changed the jobs, but it had changed the perspective of the workers. Now, the reality was beginning to seep into the public thought that one could chop fish heads to the glory of God. The paintings portrayed this. And so the rootedness that comes in with understanding one’s place in history, especially in light of the received faith, allows for a person to hold their station of time and place with a newfound dignity. As multi-dimensional creatures, we are not solely to discern and speak to our times, but our places as well. We do both time and space best when we are willing to accept our stations within them.
Within this mindset, artifacts are understood to be material manifestations of systems of faith. What one believes about God and man shows up, not only in our technology but in our aesthetics. The music we make with our tools is the product of what we believe. The cardinal doctrine of media ecology that our tools are not neutral pairs well with this vintage. The fact that regions produce dialects should tell us that regions express certain words and concepts in ways that are unique to that region. Christ commanded that regions (nations) be discipled and in the vision of glory that the book of Revelation gives us, regions have representation. The regions are not lost in the great din of a common cause. They are distinguished as being representative members of that common cause. Their representation is part of what makes the chorus beautiful. Why ought Mainers attempt to produce the best Biblical culture that we can from within? Because . . . All of Maine for Christ!
