(None of us should be snobs about anything, and I understand that his more serious stories are not for every day, or even every night. That has meaning for the whole of life, from our schools to our politics, from our friendships to our films.īut if we want, there are movies that ask more, ones that by their very nature insist that we resist the temptation to simply leave our brains at the box-offices of life. Wise ones write about us, arguing that we are “amusing ourselves to death” in Neil Postman’s sober assessment or in the words of Nicholas Carr, we are increasingly drawn to “the shallows,” less interested in stories of substance that require the complexity and nuance of critical reflection. Why is that? It is worthwhile wondering what happened to human beings in the modern world, as the 20th-century becomes more and more the 21st-century. The critics and his peers judge him to be about the best there is at making movies, even if the local cineplex has a hard time finding an audience for his films.
META NARRATIVE FULL
They are good words, full of meaning, and they give meaning to our lives- and in a surprising way they are addressed with unusual clarity in the films of Terrence Malick, the director whose work is stellar, even if not blockbuster. This past week I have drawn these words into two classes I am teaching, one for the Masters in Leadership, Theology and Society course, and one for the Gospel and Culture course. “What will you do with what you know?” being the most primordial question of all, echoing through time, becoming the most perennial question of all. Beliefs matter, yes but even more so, our loves and lives matter. Beliefs form behavior, and behavior forms belief.Īs Augustine taught us so long ago, the question, “What do you love?” is the most important question of life, deeper and more probing than, “What do you believe?” It is about the way we live, about the way we are, about what matters most to us, whether we understand its reality or not. Metanarratives shape narratives, but then, narratives shape metanarratives. Who am I? Why am I? What am I going to do with my life? But because life is what it is, our beliefs about the one shape and form the other in reality, we go back and forth, forth and back. The second word is more personal, accounting for me, myself, and I. No one is finally neutral about the things that matter most. Whether we are premodern, modern, or postmodern, whether we are Hindus, evolutionary materialists, Buddhists, Marxists, Jews, Christians, Moslems- or imagine some other way of making sense of the universe in which we live, move, and have our being -all of us believe something to be true about life and the world.
The first word is born of the belief that there is a story that shapes human life under the sun. But whether they make their way into our minds, we live with them from morning to night, as their realities are integrally woven into every heart.Įveryone everywhere lives out their meaning, whether we do so consciously or not.
Most of us find it possible to get on with our lives without using those two words every day, if ever. Words we live by- metanarrative and narrative.
0 kommentar(er)
