Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
By Andy Crouch
4/5
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About this ebook
Christianity Today Book Award winner
Publishers Weekly's best books
It is not enough to condemn culture. Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture or to copy culture. Most of the time, we just consume culture. But the only way to change culture is to create culture.
Andy Crouch unleashes a stirring manifesto calling Christians to be culture makers. For too long, Christians have had an insufficient view of culture and have waged misguided "culture wars." But we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators that God designed us to be. Culture is what we make of the world, both in creating cultural artifacts as well as in making sense of the world around us. By making chairs and omelets, languages and laws, we participate in the good work of culture making.
Crouch unpacks the complexities of how culture works and gives us tools for cultivating and creating culture. He navigates the dynamics of cultural change and probes the role and efficacy of our various cultural gestures and postures. Keen biblical exposition demonstrates that creating culture is central to the whole scriptural narrative, the ministry of Jesus and the call to the church. He guards against naive assumptions about "changing the world," but points us to hopeful examples from church history and contemporary society of how culture is made and shaped. Ultimately, our culture making is done in partnership with God's own making and transforming of culture.
A model of his premise, this landmark book is sure to be a rallying cry for a new generation of culturally creative Christians. Discover your calling and join the culture makers.
Andy Crouch
Andy Crouch is editorial director for The Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today International and executive producer of Where Faith and Culture Meet, a series of short documentary films on Christians creating "a counterculture for the common good." He is a member of the editorial board of Books & Culture, and a senior fellow of the International Justice Mission's IJM Institute. His writing has appeared in several editions of Best Christian Writing and Best Spiritual Writing. He lives with his family in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
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Reviews for Culture Making
66 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very insightful book about God's view of culture and analysis of different ways in which Christians may participate in and influence culture.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It's not easy to change culture. Change usually happens gradually and unexpectedly. Behind the changes though are people. People change culture. Andy describes how Christians can create and cultivate culture in the way God intend. But in a way we are merely participating in making culture with God. One thing I liked about the book is Andy backed his theme of the book with the scripture. He saw the limitation of culture making on our own but at the same time challenged the reader to culture making in practical ways.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An excellent and sometimes provocative new way of looking at Christians and culture. Crouch offers a more comprehensive understanding of culture -- well beyond "high culture" of the arts -- than typically found among Christian authors. His retelling of the Biblical narrative in its cultural context is very engaging. Well worth the read.