Culture Making items tagged genesis

Fig Leaf Wardrobe, by Tord Boontje

2009-01-07T15:43:49Z

Nate: “Here's a witty if not-super-practical Dutch furniture designer's play on the first post-Fall human cultural product. In this case it's the fig tree's own nakedness that's being covered up.”

Fig Leaf Wardrobe, by Tord Boontje for Meta, Copper, enamel, bronze, and hand-dyed silk :: via MoCo Loco

The Rosetta Disk

2009-01-07T15:43:49Z

Nate: “Concieved as a modern-day Rosetta Stone, the Rosetta Disk aims to preserve linguistic knowledge for the long-term future, well after DVD and even paper may decay. This side contains the teaser: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The chosen text for the microengraved parallel translations: the book of Genesis.”

photo from "Very Long-Term Backup," by Kevin Kelly, The Long Now Blog, 20 August 2008

Made in God’s image, we are creators

2009-01-07T15:43:49Z

Culture is, first of all, the name for all of our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as its given to us and make something else. This is the original insight of the writer of Genesis when he says that human beings were made in God’s image: just like the original Creator, we are creators.

—Culture Making, p.23

Not a garden, but a city

2009-01-07T15:43:49Z

Revelation 21:2 is the last thing a careful reader of Genesis 1–11 would expect: in the remade world, the center of God’s creative delight is not a Garden, but a City. And a city is, by definition, a place where culture reaches critical mass—a place where culture eclipses the natural world as the most important feature we must make something of. Somehow the city, the embodiment of concentrated human culture, has been transformed from the site of sin and judgment to the ultimate expression of grace, a gift coming “down out of heaven from God.”

—Culture Making, p.122