a different perspective from alan hartung on the emerging church, politics, faith, and life
Prayers for the Yaconnelli family
This morning I received the very sad news that Mike Yaconnelli was killed in a car accident last night. Mike was a brilliant and compassionate man who will be sorely missed.
My heart-felt prayers go up for the Yaconnelli family, his church community, and the thousands who were blessed by Mike’s life.
Consumerism, Laziness, and the Postmodern Life
A little over a month ago, I ended a stint of onsite web work for a private university. My normal week consisted of eight to ten hour days five days a week, followed by keeping up with existing clients in the evening. I know many Americans have a schedule like I Had for those six weeks basically every week of their lives. The thing that has been getting to me is how fast those six weeks flew by. They seem like a couple of weeks of my ‘normal’ life. Something about that just seems wrong and dehumanizing. I was a product in the system and it burned my time faster than I could have imagined.
Now, the flip side is I don’t think I am not supposed to do any work. The fact is, I try to live a very simple lifestyle so I can do things I love and don’t often get paid for (like being the General Editor of THEOOZE, acting in community theaters, and writing). I think human beings should engage in activities which improve mankind and are in some sense productive. The problem I am running into is the consumeristic culture is destructive, but I don’t know how much of my life can be truly considered productive in what I do. Am I just being lazy? Selfish? Or is there value in refusing to embrace the machine which would cause me to, as in the movie fight club, “work the job I hate, so I can buy things I don’t need”???
How much can a web designer really remove himself from the consumeristic culture. I can cut down my work to the bare minimum, but I am still tapped in. Removing myself isn’t the answer, but I feel like I have lived a much longer life at 30 than many at 40 or 50 who have allowed the “machine” to grind up their years.
Or am I just an idealistic punk? Seriously. Am I immoral for not wanting to work a full-time job in the traditional sense? I do more than 40 hours of work on my various projects, but most of the hours don’t pay. I don’t know … am I making any sense at all?
starting with the blog
I don’t think I am going to have a blog on cartermason.com, so I might as well start with the blog here as a transfer! This is something I posted on THEOOZE a couple of days ago:
the job i hate, so i can buy things i don’t need
I watched Fight Club again last night. For me, the film exposes a lot of the problems I feel living in the consumer culture magnified here just outside of Hollywood. The frustrating thing for me, though, the film doesn’t provide me with any solutions. Maybe for some of you it did that, but not for me. I have become all the more discontent with finding my place in this culture. Not wanting to go back to a Christian subculture burying my head in the sand, I am left to face a culture which operates on the backs of the oppressed.
The church emerging from the established seems to me all too often to just be pissed off. That isn’t entirely true, I have found relationships that go far beyond what I would ever have expected from fellow Christians. There are major plus points to this whole emerging thing … but I can’t seem to get past the feeling that we are embracing a culture too much which ignores and even feeds off of the least of my brothers and sisters. Not only those we call the least, but it feeds off of our very selves.
Perhaps an alternative culture is the answer. Perhaps it is even a sub-culture in a sense. Could it be that the Kingdom of God itself is the culture which is our answer to culture? I just wish I had a clue what that looks like, because I don’t.
Changing of the guard, changing of the name
alanhartung.com will be undergoing some major changes over the coming weeks. Once upon a day, this site was dedicated pretty much to my writings, random thoughts, theology, and spiritual babblings. When I became Editor of THEOOZE, I decided to locate all of that stuff within oozy articles, message boards, and what have you. alanhartung.com became a site dedicated to pursuit of my acting and screenwriting career.
After much thought and a little prayer, I have decided to use a stage name for my acting. The acting content of this site will be moved to the soon-coming cartermason.com. I hope you like the name. alanhartung.com will once again be a site for my personal ramblings… spiritual or otherwise. Of course, I am still the editor of THEOOZE and will continue to be active on the message boards, the blogs, and writing articles.
I think this stage name thing is a good thing. If you disagree, why don’t you send me an email and let me know how colossally stupid this idea is. My goal is to have everything switched over by November 1, 2003.
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