Criticism, Christianity, & Blogging

--> My sister and I have been discussing the prospect of blogging together for a while now. We have a shared interest in cultural criticism… which is really just a pretentious way of saying that our studies frequently lead us into concerns, bewilderment, and/or snarky conversations in response to the world around us. We’re amateurs, at best. But we believe that the best way to improve your ideas is to put them “out there” for some criticism of their own, so here is a little introduction to this attempted blog…

Much of this is going to address Christian culture, because that’s what we grew up around (and because it’s freaking hilarious). We are not here to place value judgments on Christianity; that would be a waste of time. Rather, we want to discuss the way that Christian thought has been construed to reinforce social or cultural norms. For an example of how important this is, consider the use of “the Curse of Ham” doctrine from Genesis 9 to justify the enslavement of Africans in the United States during the 1800s. This frightening example illustrates how issues of race and class connect to and are informed by popular Christian thought. This blog will tackle some of those issues, as well as gender construction, cultural commodification… and you know, all those hipster-trendy-‘enlightened-individual’ topics. [riiiiiight]

On a personal note, we aren’t writing this blog to regurgitate a bunch of garbage we learned in theory class so that you can all see how lofty and educated we are. We think these issues are really important. I went to a Christian high school where my history lessons consisted of the idea that anyone who isn’t a white American protestant is evil and unequal. Besides being just silly, this idea is terribly dangerous (not to mention blatantly ethnocentric). I also had the privilege of doing some volunteer work in high school, which I loved very much, but I was disappointed to discover that many “missions” organizations have little or no cultural awareness. I believe that this connects to the way that Western hegemony has made its ugly way into the Christian discourse. We think these things and others like them need to be addressed. Finally, we stopped looking around, waiting for someone smarter and more eloquent to come along and do it, and decided to do it ourselves. Here goes…