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1 " Where does this openness to the “other” come from in artists? Some may grow out of empathy earned because artists are themselves often exiled from a normative tribal identity. There is also training to extend that empathy. In art, we constantly train ourselves to inhabit or portray the “other.” Artists learn to be adaptable and blend into an environment while not belonging to it, which also requires learning to speak new tribal languages. "
― Makoto Fujimura , Culture Care
2 " Effective stewardship leads to generative work and a generative culture. We turn wheat into bread—and bread into community. We turn grapes into wine—and wine into occasions for joyful camaraderie, conviviality, conversation, and creativity. We turn minerals into paints—and paints into works that lift the heart or stir the spirit. We turn ideas and experiences into imaginative worlds for sheer enjoyment and to expand the scope of our empathy. "
3 " Mearcstapa is not a comfortable role. Life on the borders of a group— and in the space between groups—is prone to dangers literal and figurative, with people both at “home” and among the “other” likely to misunderstand or mistrust the motivations, piety, and loyalty of the border-stalker. But mearcstapa can be a role of cultural leadership in a new mode, serving functions including empathy, memory, warning, guidance, mediation, and reconciliation. Those who journey to the borders of their group and beyond will encounter new vistas and knowledge that can enrich the group. "
4 " What if we committed to speaking fresh creativity and vision into culture rather than denouncing and boycotting other cultural products? "
5 " An industrial map in the mid-twentieth century colored New York’s Hudson River black. The mapmakers considered a black river a good thing—full of industry! The more factory outputs, the more progress. When that map was made, “nature” was widely seen as a resource to be exploited. Few people considered the consequences of careless disposal of industrial waste. The culture has shifted dramatically over the last fifty years. When I share this story today, most people shudder and ask how anyone could think of a polluted river as good. But today we are doing the same thing with the river of culture. Think of the arts and other cultural enterprises as rivers that water the soil of culture. We are painting this cultural river black—full of industry, dominated by commercial interests, careless of toxic byproducts—and there are still cultural mapmakers who claim that this is a good thing. The pollution makes it difficult to for us to breathe, difficult for artists to create, difficult for any of us to see beauty through the murk. "
6 " What if artists became known for their generosity rather than only their self-expression? "
7 " Many of the streams that feed the river of culture are polluted, and the soil this river should be watering is thus parched and fragmented. Most of these we know, but let me briefly touch on some of the fault lines in the cultural soil (starving the soul) as well as some of the sources of the poisons in the water (polluting the soul). Starving the cultural soul One of the most powerful sources of cultural fragmentation has grown out of the great successes of the industrial revolution. Its vision, standards, and methods soon proliferated beyond the factory and the economic realm and were embraced in sectors from education to government and even church. The result was reductionism. Modern people began to equate progress with efficiency. Despite valiant and ongoing resistance from many quarters—including industry—success for a large part of our culture is now judged by efficient production and mass consumption. We often value repetitive, machine-like performance as critical to “bottom line” success. In the seductive industrialist mentality, “people” become “workers” or “human resources,” who are first seen as interchangeable cogs, then treated as machines—and are now often replaced by machines. "
8 " For any given provocation, we are egged on by our instant, omnipresent media to unleash our basest instincts—we might think of them as cultural “fight-flight-freeze” responses—rather than committing ourselves to the slower process of seeking truth.[15] (One genuinely new thing is the virtual mob, which can be just as inhumane and culturally damaging as any physical mob.) This self-debasement of our humanity in desperate and irrational fear of the “other” is a result of poor cultural stewardship. "
9 " Even today artists are often valued in the church only if they create art for the church, or at least “Christian art.” We cannot “use” the arts for evangelism or discipleship any more than we can “use” a human being for utilitarian purposes. "
10 " In some sense, a broken marriage is due to the unresolved tension between two tribal identities. All marriages are crosscultural, so a good therapist will help raise to the surface the issues and resources of each culture in the relationship and then help the two conflicting cultures come together as complements. "
11 " In the summer of 2011, a Japanese farmer planted sunflower seeds in the tainted soil of Fukushima, a few miles away from the earthquake-damaged Daiei nuclear facilities. The radioactive leakage had continued since the devastating tsunami on March 11, 2011. Why would he do that? It’s because he learned that sunflowers have a unique ability to take up radioactive isotopes and store them in their seeds. The farmer would harvest the flowers, which contained pods of radioactivity, making the earth less polluted. "
