Artisan Vancouver Church

We had our third Culture Making Collective evening last night. Almost 30 of us gathered to hear Derek Weiss –– J.R.R. Tolkien enthusiast and Faramir's biggest fan –– give a wonderful talk on Why Tolkien Matters in an Age of Social Media . Our purpose again was to think and interact about creative ways in which his art inspires us to be "culture keepers" –– intentionally stewarding good forms of culture.

As is becoming our usual practice, we built a collaboratively-derived, multiple choice "DO" list -- a bunch of ideas to act on that which inspired us. All who attended (as well as anyone reading this) are invited to pick something from this list and DO it sometime in the next few weeks. After you've done it, we highly encourage you to either comment here or write a full blog post about your experience and send it to me: nelson (at) www.artisanvancouver.ca. Oh, for those who were present last evening, if I've missed any DOs or I've phrased them wrong, please either email me or amend it yourself in the comments section. Here's the list. DO something!

1.) Post something on social media that connects you with your past.

2.) Take a social media fast: quit Facebook, Twitter, etc. for a month –– or perhaps during the season of Lent , which begins March 9 and lasts for 40 days.

3.) Craft a hand-written letter to a friend or a politician.

4.) Pick one or two people to connect with in a way that is NOT Facebook. Like, call somebody.

5.) Instead of posting your pics on Facebook, host a slideshow party in your living room.

6.) For musicians or pseudo-musicians: instead of writing, playing, videotaping and posting your self-proclaimed silly songs on YouTube for an "imagined" audience, try playing them for real people, in real life, in real time.

7.) READ The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Everyone present last night had seen the films, but only about half had read the books. Read it by yourself, read it aloud to someone, or listen to an audiobook version. Whatever you do, read.