The Conviction of Things Not Seen by Todd E. Johnson

Author:Todd E. Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL062000, REL067000
ISBN: 9781441215185
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

Thinking through Others

The first of the two challenges has to do with the ways in which we are essentially working “across cultures” in our teaching and learning. There are many ways to speak of this challenge—and many who have done so. In this chapter I will address only one such cross-cultural work, which regards the division of the print-based academy and the mass-mediated popular culture context outside of it. I have written at length in other contexts about this divide, but I believe that one of the frameworks by which I have engaged this divide—Richard Shweder’s—bears repeating.[14]

Shweder, a cultural anthropologist, has developed a four-part typology for the ways in which anthropologists “think through others.” His framework suggests they do so by thinking by means of the other, getting the other straight, deconstructing and going beyond the other, and witnessing in the context of engagement with the other. Each of these strategies follows upon the other, and so it is worth taking them each in turn. “Thinking by means of the other” has to do with engaging some aspect of the “other” as a means to learn more about ourselves.

Thinking through others in the first sense is to recognize the other as a specialist or expert on some aspect of human experience, whose reflective consciousness and systems of representations and discourse can be used to reveal hidden dimensions of our selves.[15]

Shweder’s first mode requires an honest acknowledgement of the ways in which the “other”—and here I am suggesting academic culture in relation to mass-mediated popular culture as “other”—can indeed be expert in some way. Faculty at graduate theological institutions are familiar with thinking of ourselves as “experts” in various kinds of discourse and study that can reveal hidden dimensions of thought and reality. But how often do we acknowledge that popular mass-mediated culture might also have resources to bring to this task? Certainly our students are expected to recognize and grant authority to our expertise, but how often do we acknowledge our students’ fluency in the discourses of popular culture? There are rare professors who hire students to write web pages for them, for instance, or to serve as participant observers in ethnographic observations of youth culture. But even here, we, the faculty, hold the defining and controlling expertise.

Yet it is in media culture—no more evident than in the recent months since September 11, 2001—that the most relevant questions of faith are being debated. It is within digital media (a category that includes television, film, radio, and the Internet) that decisions are being made on questions of crucial communal importance. The divide between an academic religious culture and a digitally mediated culture was perhaps no more evident than in the three major rituals of grief and healing after September 11—the service in the U.S. national cathedral and the multichannel televised fundraising event put together by Tom Hanks and other Hollywood superstars. For many, if not most, Americans, it was the second event that was watched, talked about, and emotionally resonant. Our

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