Just to let you know that I’ve been invited to join the blogging crew at S.T. Karnick’s The American Culture blog. This will not affect my blogging here in any way. Mostly I’ll be reposting reviews from this blog over there.
The American Culture is not a conservative blog, as Sam Karnick describes it, but a classical liberal blog. Its two principle er… principles are freedom of expression, and personal responsibility as the mechanism that makes freedom possible. Sam writes:
I don’t have any formal ground rules on story/essay angles other than this: we’re for liberty, and we enjoy and appreciate culture, including popular culture. To wit, we don’t just complain about the culture but instead report on what’s good as well. To this end, it’s important to note a principle I consider essential and which nearly everybody on the right fails to understand: depiction is not advocacy. Instead of blindly totting up instances of various events in a work and then complaining about it being too dirty and not at all like The Sound of Music (which is of course a darn good film but not the only way to communicate edifyingly), we go deeper and consider the real meaning of it. Thus a book full of gory murders can be very edifying while a book about a Christian family can be very bad art. It’s the assumptions and thoughts they purvey that count.
I think that’s an extremely important principle. It means (which ought to be obvious) that a book that deals with adultery is not necessarily a book in favor of adultery. A book that depicts bigotry is not necessarily a bigoted book (a principle generally out of fashion today). A book that wrestles with questions about the goodness of God is not necessarily blasphemous. Any subject, no matter how disturbing, can be handled morally in a moral story. It’s all in the treatment of the material.
(Just don’t ask me to watch a movie with two guys kissing. Ick.)
