Alissa Wilkinson

Reason to hope: shared meals

Alissa Wilkinson — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:00:00 -0700

In a world where food can be increasingly expensive and people don't share meals with one another too often, dinner co-ops are springing up around the country. Despite their potential problems, this seems like it could be a wonderful way to share the burdens.

Do you know of a church that might be pursuing this within their congregation?

Do you film well?

Alissa Wilkinson — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:18:16 -0700

If you can excuse a moment of semi-shameless self-promotion - along with five other accomplished film critics and writers, I'm involved with a new venture called Filmwell, a website interested in cinema off the beaten track and criticism at the margins of the great conversation. We launched today, and below is the press release. Hope you'll check us out.

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Hi,

We are happy to announce the release of Filmwell (www.filmwell.org), a new website that will be updated daily with essays, film and DVD reviews, and news on cinema off the beaten track. Founding Filmwell contributors include widely published authors and critics, as well as film festival programmers and educators. Filmwell content is dictated by the whims of its contributors, who frequent national festivals, scour DVD catalogs and screening schedules, and are otherwise always on the hunt for those films that make this great conversation so worthwhile. Yet another film blog? Maybe. But our collective audiences are hungry for an entry point to thoughtful criticism on films they haven't heard about yet.

Please put us on your rss feeder for a while. If we aren't already on your publicity lists, let us know. We look forward to hearing from you if you have any questions.

Kindest Regards,

The Editors and Contributors at Filmwell

Reasons to hope: The new homemaking

Alissa Wilkinson — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:51:11 -0700

Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, women decided they could have careers, go to college, and do all the things the boys were doing. While that had some definite negative effects (sexual revolution, anyone?), there were good things about it too. Women and men are different, which means that they bring different types of thinking and different views to the table; as a gross generality, women take more easily to detail-oriented work, and empathize more fully (a handy trait in a doctor or a teacher or a social worker). We need both genders involved in building and maintaining our civilization, as well as raising our families.

But somewhere along the way, the baby got thrown out with the bathwater - sometimes literally. Not only were career homemakers sometimes looked down upon by this society of acquisition and materialism, but the entire job of making a home - the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and entertaining - was outsourced to fast-food restaurants, frozen-food proprietors, maids, babysitters, television, after-school activities, and restaurants.

While some of these conveniences can be good - recall that the woman described in Proverbs 31 had a career, a well-fed family, a well-respected husband, and hired help - there's something to be said for the act of making a home. Home-making. In her recent book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about physical labor as a balancing vocation to her more scholarly pursuits:

I no longer call such tasks housework. I call them the domestic arts, paying attention to all the ways they return me to my senses. When the refrigerator has nothing in it but green onions that have turned to slime and plastic containers full of historic leftovers, I know my art is languishing. When I cannot tell whether that is a sleeping cat or an engorged dust ball under my bed, I know that I have been spending too much time thinking. it is time to get down on my knees. After I have spent a whole morning ironing shirts, folding linens, rubbing orange-scented wax into wood, and cleaning dead bugs out of the light fixtures, I can hear the whole house purring for the rest of the afternoon. I can often hear myself singing as well, satisfied with such simple, domestic purpose.

Kathleen Norris, in her lovely little book The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and "Women's Work", says:

Our culture's ideal self, especially the accomplished, professional self, rises above necessity, the humble, everyday, ordinary tasks that are best left to unskilled labor. The comfortable lies we tell ourselves regarding these "little things" - that they don't matter, and that daily personal and household chores are of no significance to us spiritually - are exposed as falsehoods when we consider that reluctance to care for the body is one of the first symptoms of extreme melancholia. Shampooing the hair, washing the body, brushing the teeth, drinking enough water, taking a daily vitamin, going for a walk, as simple as they seem, are acts of self-respect. They enhance one's ability to take pleasure in oneself and in the world. At its Greek root the word acedia means "lack of care," and indifference to one's welfare can escalate to overt acts of self-destruction and even suicide . . .

A mature feminism recognizes that subjects such as cooking can be difficult for women to address, as they have so often been seen as insignificant "women's work," but it also asks us to recognize that their intimate nature makes them serious and important.

Edith Schaeffer, from The Hidden Art of Homemaking (a delightful little book) points out that creative and artful home-making isn't just for wives and mothers:

There should be a practical result of the realization that we have been created in the image of the Creator of beauty. Whether you are married and have a family; whether you share a house or a flat with one or a number of people; whether you still live with your parents; whether you live alone and have guests in from time to time; whether you are a man or a woman: the fact that you are a Christian should show in some practical areas of a growing creativity and sensitivity to beauty, rather than in an gradual drying up of creativity, and a blindness to ugliness . . .

Which is all why I was pleased to find this entry at one of my favorite blogs recently - a blog that is widely read and neither faith-based nor female-oriented. The blog entry is titled "A New Homemaking":

Without the steadiness and identity that home can provide, there is little support for negotiating our way through the rough and tumble terrain of a human life. While home is always a work in progress and as subject to change as any other thing, it nonetheless also offers us the potential for stability and shelter.
And remember, home is not always just a place, it's also a state of mind, a way of relating to the world that is rooted in belonging. As adults, our homes reflect not just who we are, but who we've decided to be.

For a while there, home and homemaking took a real hit as we broke molds, discovered new roles and strode forth into a future laden with promotions, financial mobility, and lots and lots and lots of stuff. There's nothing wrong with wanting a career or providing materially for our families, except that we throw out the baby with the bathwater when we give these pursuits a higher value than the heath and well-being of our homelife and, consequentially, the planet we live on.

What I'm starting to see today, and what makes me happy and a little hopeful, is that people are rediscovering the value of homemaking, but in new and innovative ways. There are major changes: the new homemaking is no longer gender specific, it's not about the relentless pursuit of bigger spaces and more stuff, and it's not necessarily the classic nuclear family either.

Here's to the cultural re-invigoration of simple, healthy homelife.

Reason to hope: Poetry, not violence

Alissa Wilkinson — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:00:00 -0700

Last week, I was on my way home from a lecture at the Museum of Biblical Art. For those who are unfamiliar with NYC geography, the trip from MOBIA to my Brooklyn neighborhood is not short - about forty-five minutes from door to door. I wasn't feeling well, so I'd tucked myself into a corner seat with my current read and a cup of green tea for the long haul home. People in various states of exhaustion sat listening to their iPod earbuds, staring at the advertising lining the subway car. A crowd of teenagers bundled into the subway at the next stop and started talking loudly and heatedly down at the other end.

About twenty minutes later - somewhere in the Village - I realized that the crowd of teenagers were having a full-blown argument about something. I started to get nervous - you just never know what will happen when people get into heated discussions - but then I listened more closely and realized what was going on.

They were having something I could only describe as a slam-off. Each time the doors closed and we started moving, one of the young men would start on a new slam poem - as far as I could tell, they were completely spontaneous - and go as far as he could on it until the train stopped again. Then the other guy would get a turn. There was a lot of "your momma" and "your face" jokes going on in the poetry, but there was also truly entrancing rhyme and rhythm. Poetry arguments. Brilliant.

Fifteen stops later, I got out at my station. The teens, who had been angry with one another when they got onto the train, were laughing and continuing as I got off. Anger had been dispelled, and the potentially volatile situation had been defused with a duel - not with swords, but with poetry.

That was cool.

Reason to hope: good, roasted gifts

Alissa Wilkinson — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 09:00:00 -0800

This week was particularly busy for those of us at IAM (like Christy, Mako, and Mark - and me!), as the annual IAM Encounter in downtown Manhattan was taking place. My reason to hope this week? God gives good gifts to his children, like espresso.

Reason to hope: Community AND good stewardship of the earth

Alissa Wilkinson — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:00:00 -0800

As Good magazine reported a few weeks ago, carpooling is burgeoning in San Francisco (where it's been a way of life for decades). Though some carpools lend themselves to stern silences, others are more convivial, lending themselves to knowing your neighbors. Meeting new people and reducing the strain that cars put on the environment? Sounds like a good idea to me.

Reason to hope: Intellectualism valued

Alissa Wilkinson — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:00:00 -0800

Reason to hope: as we published in Comment several months ago, places like the Laurentian Leadership Centre exist, giving me hope that the anti-intellectualism trend in the church may turn in my lifetime.

Reasons to hope: People's stories

Alissa Wilkinson — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 09:00:00 -0800

A reason to have hope for our culture: an increased interest in the stories of the everyman, which I see as a twofold blessing: it bucks against "celebrity culture", and it reminds us that it takes all kinds of people to make a world. Two great places to hear people's stories are The Moth and This American Life.

A host of reasons to hope

Alissa Wilkinson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:44:28 -0800

Want a whole host of reasons to hope?

Check out the latest print edition of Comment magazine. (If you're not a subscriber, you can buy a copy from our website.) In this edition, we asked writers, teachers, businesspeople, ministers, theologians, composers, CEOs, and seminary presidents what signs of hope they see in our culture. The answers are vibrant, varied, and provocative.

We've also put together a Comment manifesto, chock-full of a Biblical vision for the world that ought to be.The manifesto was published in the most recent issue of Comment, but we've made it available online.

Full disclosure: I am an associate editor at Comment, which is a journal of the Ontario-based think tank Cardus.

Reasons for hope #3: Peaceful transfer of power

Alissa Wilkinson — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:00:00 -0800

Today, God willing, the highest ranking office in our government will pass peacefully from one man to another - and not just from man to man, but from political party to political party, and under circumstances that would have been unfathomable just fifty years ago.

In 2000, when the election results were decided after a wearying month-long court battle, the results thrilled some and infuriated others. Those results are still disputed. But I recall feeling very proud of my country, because although emotions were running high, there were no riots or flag-burnings, and nobody burned the Supreme Court down. A peaceful transfer of power in the midst ofheated disagreement is something that not many around the world get to experience.