A few weeks ago someone made a comment about my approaching @CRightcast like an information architecture project, and it rang true. One of the phrases used often in the IA world is “Sense-Making.”
It’s not about designing navigation trees or taxonomies or what not, but about turning a complex tangle of things into a grasp-able shape. Something that not only helps you understand ~the thing~, but how that thing fits in with others around it.
One of the challenges talking about the Christian right is that it’s not simply a fuzzy-boundaried movement, it’s a cluster of contradictory and sometimes genuinely duplicitous movements whose pathologies and goals form a particular aggregate.
That’s a whole lot of words to say: it is not one thing but many things, and explaining its operation and nature is a systems thinking kind of problem.
I talk a lot about first-hand knowledge I have from years inside of that movement, but that doesn’t mean I am The Expert on it; in some ways my close up view of certain specific parts of the Christian Right distorts my perspective on others.
It takes care and many perspectives to build a clear picture of the whole, and it’s why I’ve found such value in the works of scholars like @DanielVacaIII, @EdwardsRhetoric, @julieingersoll, and the MANY writers like @C_Stroop bringing their experience and insight to the table.