Artisan Nobility

A Thesis written at the end of my three year run in the Mad City Training Community in Madison, WI; “A Study on the Redemption of the Imagination through the Life and Death of Christ”. Last revision: April 19, 2009.

Artisan Nobility PDF (right-click to download)

A Review: Shop Class as Soul Craft

It is hard to describe how it affected me when I first listened to the audio version of Matthew B. Crawford’s essay from the New Atlantis proposing that manual labour nurtures a psychological maturity, cognitive refinement and simple “job satisfaction”. It is difficult to describe because I first heard it while I was engaged in manual labour myself and it was a strange sensation to hear through my iPod earbuds a voice confirming something deep in me. Something that was aware enough to push me to quit school in anticipation of the boredom of a desk job, but something that was too subconscious for me to explain. Here is an excerpt from Crawford’s Essay:

You Cannot Look at Your Eye

To say that lately I have been thinking about this concept which I will try to define as a ‘misdirection of revolution’ would mostly be a lie. This concept has been fluttering about my head and heart for some time now but not until recently was I able to pin it to the wall long enough to get a look at it and have the ability to give it a name. I could make a choice to take a detour here and have an exploration of how an idea grows inside of me completely independent of my understanding, but I won’t. It would be interesting and full of humorous analogies but it would simply be a very beautiful and colourful distraction.

Much of what I read today about the church of Christ, or hear from others in how they understand the changes that God is catalyzing all over the world is a conversation about the restructuring of the way church ‘is done’, and I think that much of it is in danger of being a misdirected revolution. In Houses that Change the World, Wolfgang Simpson champions that a House Church model is the biblical blueprint for the structure of the Body of Christ. He writes about Luther and Calvin, saying that ‘They reformed the content but not the form of Christianity. They “could not decide to break from the sociological forms of church since the time of Constantine.” [Visser’t Hoft] ‘