An Unfolding View of Cultural Engagement

I have been challenged to clarify the issues of an unfolding view of cultural engagement. These issues have resulted from an inherent conflict between one view that advocates engaging culture, and a second view that advocates a withdrawal from engaging culture, even rejecting culture. I posit a preferred, or third view, namely that of informing culture as the real essence of engagement. The inquiry into cultural engagement begins with the metaphor of the Petri Dish, that unique place where cultures are grown, hence its pseudonym, the Culture Dish, and as a place where any engagement often looks and feels more like an unconscious ballet.

            Among respective contributions by other scholars to the discourse and inquiry, I found a rich aggregate of research to substantiate the growth of my views inside the Culture Dish. By examining such concepts as defining culture, Christ and culture, two views of engaging culture, and a third preferred view of informing culture, the tension between the two is resolved in the third, by asking the question, “how should we then live?”

Defining cultural engagement in a preferred view, is to define cultural engagement in a less provocative, non-redemptive way as activities of people, offering a more informed way of clarifying the issues through a new kind of seeing, where things become new by unfolding the issues. An informed culture is a culture that can think critically about the manner in which that culture has been engaged. In defining culture, I submit that it is an ontological and epistemological problem of assumptions about what it is to be Christian. The basis on which such assumptions are founded, especially in the conventional use of Christian as an adjective, is invalid. What is valid, is the emergence of the artist’s role in a technological world, as the artician in ministry, with a prophetic imagination to produce a creative surround within culture. This creative surround can find expression in a stylistic approach such as the narrative manner, a literary manner, or a mixed-style manner, each meant to enhance the artician’s process of communication and processing of positive information, towards a meaningful cultural engagement of knowledge sharing.

As such, research into the issue of engaging culture must aim towards informed leadership, that is, an engaged leadership whose mandate is not adversarial or controversial. It is a leadership in which the artician participates within an informed mandate.

A preferred strategy of informing culture, comprises the unfolding view of cultural engagement as a means to introduce others to the lives we live, whether by allegory, metaphor, narrative, didactic, dialectical engagement, or in a broad context through the expressive arts. The artician’s communication mandate is not one of persuasion or conviction based on the promise of an unforgettable experience, but on the testimony that we ourselves have an account of our unforgettable experience.

Image: “Unconscious Ballet,” No.4 in Series. By Gerrit Verstraete. 2008. Cat. No. 1059. 30 X 22 in. / 76 X 56 cm. Carbon pencil on paper.