The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality - International Voices in ...

140 The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality
Kentucky, just outside Cincinnati, Ohio. The purpose of this visit,
as had been arranged with its proprietors and staff beforehand, was
to come to a first-hand understanding of the Museum and the
message(s) it seeks to convey; to adapt Marshall McLuhan’s
famous phrase: a museum is a message. 2 Museums too are a form
of mass communication, set up with great effort in order to say
something. 3 They are more static and with a more limited direct
range of contact than the popular mass media of our time, such as
the newspaper and television, but as cultural deposits they are
more durable 4 and are certainly more imposing during direct
personal contact, which explains the continued existence of this
mass medium in a culture given to economy and fleetingness.
To come to an understanding of the message(s) of the Creation
Museum and the way it conveys such was, in the mode of the
anthropologist, 5 the purpose of my visit. Based on extensive prior
reading which resulted in a loosely structured interview schedule
of open questions, meetings were held with managerial, creative,
and academic staff members employed at the Museum, with
further impressions gained from impromptu informal discussions
with visitors to the Museum. Extensive notes were taken of the
milieu, the Museum’s official personal and video presentations,
and of the bookstore, with copies of the DVDs, reading material
and a regular newsletter distributed by the Creation Museum (or
more accurately, by its parent company, Answers in Genesis—
www.answersingenesis.org) further informing my observations.
2 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (2d ed.; Toronto:
Signet Books, 1964); cf. J. Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan. Cosmic Media
(London: SAGE, 2005), 164.
3 Cf. A. L. Jones, “Exploding Canons: The Anthropology of Museums,” Annual
Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 201–20; J. Haas, “Power, Objects, and a
Voice for Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 37 (1996): 1–22.
4 Cf. Lombaard, “Fleetingness and Media-ted Existence,” 17–29.
5 Cf. B. Morris, Religion and Anthropology. A Critical Introduction (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–13.