I just finished reading Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch. It was a book I really enjoyed. Andy comes at the conversation of how Christians should interact with culture from a more Biblical, artistic, and intellectual perspective than anything I’ve read before.
Most books on this topic tend to use statistics and analysis of them to show what is “working” in today’s world without giving background for why that is a good way for Christians to interact with culture.
If I could give the whole book a thesis it would be…Christians can bring the hope of God into the world by creating God-inspired culture, rather than condemning the culture around them they dislike. God has called us to be culture makers. Not imitators or condemners.
Here are my highlights from the book:
- “We make sense of the world by making something of the world. The human question for meaning is played out in human making.”
- “Culture is not changed by simply thinking.”
- “It is difficult to think of a single instance where condemnation of a work of art has produced any result other than heightened notoriety for the work and the artist.”
- “The rise of interest in cultural transformation has been accompanied by a rise in cultural transformation of a different sort—the transformation of the church into the culture’s image.”
- Your calling is, “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Any of these resonate with you?
