Articles
 Justice for All
 Church in Decline
 Striking Similarity
 The Efficacy of Prayer
 Are You Ready for Change?
 A Question of Vocation
 The Challenge of Change
 Elul 24
 Elul 23
 Elul 22

Series [All]
 Administration
 Elul 5777 (9)
 Exploring Translation Theories (25)
 Live Like You Give a Damn
 Memory and Identity
 The Creative Word (19)
 The Cross-Cultural Process (7)
 The Old Testament is Dying
 The Oral Gospel Tradition (4)
 We the People (8)

Archive

Tuesday, 16 August 2016

The Struggle of Culture

Religion and Cultural Memory (tr. Rodney Livingstone),
Jan Assmann, Stanford University Press, 2006, page 81

Picking up why culture is important, Assmann introduces a chapter about writing, memory and identity. He starts with a remarkable piece of prose:

All culture is a struggle with oblivion ... Can we not regard this enture unceasing labour on forms of culture, this constant process of making visible and articulating, of presentation and preservation, as one long mnemotechnical project in which memory creates markers in the struggle against the furies of disappearance and forgetting, and builds stopping places in the river of change and disintegration?

That is why it so important to keep swimming upstream. Even treading water, while it may keep our heads above the water-line, allows the current to sweep us away downstream. Just to maintain the status quo takes constant effort to swim against the current!

Posted By Jonathan, 8:04am Comment Comments: 0