Week 10: Weight of the World

This week I really want to concentrate on Francois Bonvin's article entitled Sick Person as Object found in The Weight of the World by Pierre Bourdieu et al..

I was struck by the hospital culture in France (which is likely not very different from America). In the article, Bonvin relates how the mission of the hospital is lost. In the startling article, he articulates through Isabelle his interviewee how the sick are not treated as patients but as objects or even worse, nuisances.

Isabelle states:

You are reduced to a state of nothingness. It's a question of convenience. They no longer think that they're dealing with a human being, I think. (Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World, 1999, 597.)

Furthermore, she says:

[The doctors] had impossibly limited minds, they reduced you to your handicap. (Ibid., 592)

It was a wake up call to me and my treatment of the HIV/AIDS crisis as I had always assumed that providing the opportunity to medical care would be the cure all to some extent. But this article has woken me up to the reality that the presence of the possibility of proper medical care does not necessarily ensure proper medical care.

What can be done about the culture of the medical world? I am afraid that the church as a body can do very little. This is something that can only be changed from the inside, that is from the doctors themselves. Jesus following doctors must be careful themselves from falling into this trap. The sick and the dying, those suffering from HIV/AIDS are not nuisances nor are they defined by their condition. Those suffering from HIV/AIDS are people. To borrow from Martin Luther King Jr., we are to embrace a universal altruism that values people as fellow people.

This exhortation is not limited to doctors. All too often, I'm afraid, the church has limited its view of those suffering from HIV/AIDS as the disease itself. That is, when we see someone with HIV/AIDS, we see HIV/AIDS, not the fellow person created in the image of God. Can we identify with that person? Or is that person someone "other", outside of our realm of consciousness, outside of the care of the family?

Week 9: Inventing Popular Culture

I found this week's readings interesting... it's just too bad that in large it didn't address our topic.

Two quotes, however, really struck me as I was reading this week:

1) "We make history and we are made by history; we make culture and we are made by culture. Culture (like language) both enables and constrains." (Storey, Inventing Popular Culture, 2003. 60.)

This was an empowering quote. It helped to read that we are not merely victims of culture. That instead we have a say. It is true that we become products of our culture. But we become products of a culture that we create. And so, with that thought, it is possible to change our culture and change ourselves and identities.

In relation to HIV/AIDS, we have noticed that there are many barriers to getting the proper care to developing countries. The immediate urge is to want to try to revolutionize that particular culture so that many of those barriers would be knocked down. But we would be wise to look to our own culture and country and see that there are barriers here as well that prevent those suffering from HIV/AIDS from receiving the proper treatment socially and medically. As products of this culture, what can we do to change/mold/shape our own culture?

2) "Consumption is a significant part of the circulation of shared and conflicting meanings we call culture. We communicate through what we consume." (Ibid. 78.)

What is implied here is that we can change culture by changing our consumption. If we are to be serious about changing the culture of the western church as many of us seem to be suggesting, we would doing well according to Storey by examining what we consume. What does the North American church consume? What does the church tell us to consume? What does the church inadvertantly advertise?

This is coming from my own personal bias, but, my limited observations thus far indicate that the North American church advertises owning property, having the latest and coolest of gadgets, dressing well with name brand products (sometimes faux name brand products that are overtly "Christian"), driving a car, having a talented motivational speaker speak every week, and listening to the in-music or playing the in-music with expensive band equipment, among others.

I wonder if we know what we're asking for when we say that the North American church needs to change. Are we cognizant of the costs? Do we realize that some of the things that we have grown accustomed to, grown to love and embrace about our churches are the very things that in very subtle ways lull us into becoming the very people we want to change within our churches?

Concretely, are we as churches willing to sacrifice buying a multi-channel sound board, and instead opt to support World Vision's work against HIV/AIDS? We would not see the results of such work immediately. We may not see it work within our community. We may not see it work with our own eyes at all. And perhaps that is just it. Perhaps it is not overt greed that prevents us from action as much as it is a desire to know for sure that our money is being used well and makes a difference. When we buy the sound board, we can hear the difference the next Sunday. The effect is felt. But when we give that same money overseas, often, we simply don't observe any difference, and the disappointment sets in.