Advertising, after all, doesn’t feed or house us, or educate us, or enlighten us, or make our lives better or more beautiful. Instead, advertising makes our culture less spirited or fearless, more servile and uninspired. Surely all that money could be better spent producing something we actually care about.
— Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), p. 213
One of the things we talk about with Christianity is tools for spiritual discernment, recognizing that they all are imperfect, especially imperfect alone as they critique one another. Some of those tools for spiritual discernment are: community, Bible, experience, tradition, the experience of the poor, other authentic faiths. I refer to these as “eyes” we then bring to the spiritual practice.
What I have recognized is a need to train this “eye.” And we kind of do that off to the side in seminaries. Like yeah, we know it is there but we don’t center it with rigor and with broad analysis to get people on the journey. We need deep, strong spiritual critique of culture with trained eyes.
As a straight, white, upper-class (in relation to the globe), male, my eye is clouded with a whole bunch of shit that makes it tough to see at times. I would want a first year seminary class that recognized a need to train the eye.
Below are the texts/media I would include, recognizing we start with beginners, and we need broad sweeping work to help them get started.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’ Travelling, and the Eye of Arrogance,” in Making Face, Making Soul
George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant
Bell Hooks, Teaching to Transgress
Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Noam Chomsky, Language and the Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures
Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, also available as 2023 CBC Massey Lectures podcasts.