Forgive me for writing a comment unrelated to your post’s subject, but I haven’t been able to find a better way of contacting you. I noticed a comment you made over on the “Divine Demarcation” thread on Evangelical Outpost. You linked to your MA thesis, but it seems to be inaccessible to me due to Baylor’s servers being password protected.

I’d very much like to read your thesis, as I’m intensely interested in the topic your referred to in your post, the Christian response to the horrific view of the supernatural that appears in Lovecraft and elsewhere.

Is there some way that you could send me the text of your thesis? I think my email address should appear in the link on my name, but in case it doesn’t, it’s trinite(dot)ethan(at)gmail(dot)com. Thank you for your consideration.

Of course, Amos Comenius (a Dutch guy of Reformed persuasion) is the great contact point for the notions of public schooling and the “teacher:classroom :: sun:flower” principle which underlies modern education (and much homiletics). He’s wrong, but interesting. In any case, though, he does not have the theoretical commitments to “culture” as the new Messiah which is pervasive in my field.

It is not that what we might call small-c culture, that is, the artefacts of a society, particularly the ones we preserve and prefer, don’t have meaning. Otherwise I *would* be in a rather pointless place.

And, as I’ve said, there have been times I *do* think it’s rather like a game, which one plays because there are those who will pay to see it played well. Some aspects of any field of worldly endeavor *are* so.

Generally, I do not think that placing any cultural vision at the center makes sense. Certainly, in the sense current in American culture, to do so is to concede from the outset the Arnoldian / Marxian / Deweyan vision, in significant part if not in whole. One concedes that the production of such-and-such citizens, who fit in with such-and-such State, are the purposes for art, and scholarship, and education, and science, etc. Just because one version has a (reduction of) Christian morality and creed for its flavor and color, and another has an in-your-face and in flagrante delicto repudiation of this, does not make the candle worth the game.

Rather, with all our ability to critique and “read” culture for the benefit of our lives and learning as Christians and as churches, we must have the ability to continually repudiate any particular culture; we must perpetually be able to affirm that we would rather not be here.

As an aside, I think you’re completely out to lunch on the worthlessness of culture, btw. How do you reconcile your committment to education, literature and culture with your seeming belief in its meaninglessness? For some reason, that reminds me of the existentialists. . .

Or am I the one out to lunch?