Urban Filling and Urban Judgment

12 01 2012

by Brian Walsh

A meditation on Isaiah 2.5-22

Culture is not optional.

I’m pretty sure that my former colleague, Calvin Seerveld, coined that phrase.

Culture is not optional because there is no such thing as human life together that is not at heart a culture-forming enterprise. Human language, family structures, gender relations, economies, agriculture and creative expression is all culturally founded and culturally formative.

And for ancient Israel, culture making is at the very foundation of human identity. We are mandated to be fruitful, to multiply and to “fill” the earth. Read the rest of this entry »


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Practice Resurrection

15 09 2010

by Brian Walsh

So what do you get when 130 people converge on Russet House Farm for a Practicing Resurrection conference? A lot of good conversations, shared meals, wet sleeping bags, rich worship, great workshops and a couple of fantastic teachers in Ched Myers and Elaine Enns. You can get a taste for the conference from Jen Galicinski’s YouTube piece.

Wanting to remind us of the imaginative source of our conference title, I opened our time together by reading Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” and then proceeded to offer my own prose/poem.

“Practice resurrection”

Those two words,
…the rallying cry of the Mad Farmer Liberation Front,
… the summation of the Manifesto,
those two words,
…the heart of Christian discipleship,
…the invitation and call of this weekend conference,
two subversive words spoken in the face of a culture of death.

Read the rest of this entry »


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On EMPIRE and Empire

21 01 2009

 by Sylvia Keesmaat

Our friends over at culture is not optional (*cino), Rob and Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma are teaching a course this semester at Calvin College on pop culture and empire. They sent a couple of questions to Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat that they were struggling with.

We thought that Sylvia’s response was insightful, so we present here Kirstin’s questions and Sylvia’s reply.

Kirstin: Would you talk about a capital-e Empire as the archetype to the anti-Kingdom? (Empire=evil, Kingdom=good, both manifesting themselves in human culture to varying degrees) Alternately, is there no Empire, but only small-e empire–a collection of manifestations throughout time and place (including within the human heart) that need to be sorted out for what’s good and evil? Read the rest of this entry »


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