The Machine

Here’s an interesting little article which you might find interesting… Jason from The Church and Postmodern Culture takes a quick look at the word machine from a pre-modern architectural perspective, and gets us thinking about why we load the word with certain connotations… here’s the first paragraph:

“Everyone these days seems so annoyed at the machine. “Organic” is all the rage: “organic” leadership structures, “organic” food (which somehow implies the opposite of “mechanical” food, lol, I guess), “organic” architecture (the famous Frank Lloyd Wright, whose buildings were actually quite mechanical, btw), “organic” church services, and a bunch more “organic” stuff that I’m probably forgetting at the moment. The point is, everyone seems to love “organic.” And on top of that everyone seems to have a deep mistrust and even hate for the machine. There’s a famous band called “Rage Against The Machine”, for goodness sakes! But I have a sneaking suspicion that this is often at least somewhat of a knee-jerk reflex against a misunderstood presence and history of the machine in our society.”

Read the full article here: http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2008/03/the-machine.html