Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch

I thought I was going to really like this book. The first few chapters were so interesting; I have them all marked up, but then somewhere along the line it lost its punch. I do very much like the idea of being creators of culture instead of merely explainers or analyzers. Everyone is called to create in some sense.

The basic idea of the book centers on the fact that ones WORLDVIEW may not be as powerful and defining as is often thought, especially a Christian worldview. According to several authors, "the world seems strangely unaffected by the "transforming vision" or our worldview. We may not, in fact, actually embody the values of our worldview; we may just hold it, compartmentalized in our brain somewhere.

"What is wrong? The problem is an ineffectual, "disembodied Christianity, one that makes little difference in culture or even, all too often, in the life choices of its adherents. Yet this is subtly rewritten into a fundamentally intellectual problem, that of insufficient attention to or perception of the Christian worldview."

What is the [supposed] remedy? The remedy is further explication of, and sometimes defense of, the truth of the Christian worldview."[NOT.]

"..seminars, worldview books...these may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. . . . the culture is not changed simply by thinking." [emphasis mine]

"the academic fallacy is that once you have understood something--analyzed and critiqued it--you have changed it."

"The only way to change culture is to create more of it."

"The greatest danger of copying culture, as a posture, is that it may well become all too successful. We end up creating an entire subcultural world within which Christians comfortably move and have their being without ever encountering the broader cultural world they are imitating. We breed a generation that prefers facsimile to reality, simplicity to complexity (for cultural copying, almost by definition, ends up sanding off the rough and surprising edges of any cultural good it appropriates), and familiarity to novelty. Not only is this a generation incapable of genuine creative participation in the ongoing drama of human culture making, it is dangerously detached from a God who is anything but predictable and safe."

"And when they consume, cultivators and creators do so without becoming mere consumers. They do not derive their identity from what they consume but what they create."

"...to prevent Adam and Eve from living eternally in the futility of their vain attempt to "be like God, knowing good and evil," not realizing that knowing good and evil was very different from being able to choose good and reject evil."

Good stuff.