No doubt there always will be some people willing to do anything at all that is economically or technologically possible, who look upon the world and its creatures without affection and therefore as exploitable without limit. Against that limitlessness, in which we foresee assuredly our ruin, we have only our ancient effort to define ourselves as human and humane. But this ages-long, imperfect, unendable attempt, with its magnificent record, we have virtually disowned by assigning it to the ever more subordinate set of school subjects we call “arts and humanities” or, for short, “culture.” Culture, so isolated, is seen either as a dead-end academic profession or as a mainly useless acquisition to be displayed and appreciated “for its own sake.” This definition of culture as “high culture” actually debases it, as it debases also the presumably low culture that is excluded: the arts, for example, of land use, life support, healing, housekeeping, homemaking.
I don’t like to deal in categorical approvals, and certainly not of the arts. Even so, I do not concede that the “fine arts,” in general, are useless or unnecessary or even impractical. I can testify that some works of art, by the usual classification fine, have instructed, sustained, and comforted me for many years in my opposition to industrial pillage.
But I would insist that the economic arts are just as honorably and authentically refinable as the fine arts. And so I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods. This is the economy that the most public and influential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us.
http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture
Wendell Berry on love and redemption http://t.co/EfkCDX4r #Kindle
Ira Glass on Storytelling (by David Shiyang Liu)
Ira Glass is amazing, one of my favorite storytellers and the advice here is stellar. Very applicable for the amount of crappy preaching seminarians produce (and listen to from each other- seriously, there is nothing worse than preaching labs…)
HT: Sinnett
Murmuration (by Sophie Windsor Clive)
Failue fear and growth http://t.co/s8ZS7O7y #Kindle
— Martin Luther (via utahjones)
http://t.co/oZWlTkcl #Kindle

