We make sense of the world by making something of the world. The human quest for meaning is played out in human making: the finger-painting, omelet-stirring, chair-crafting, snow-swishing activities of culture. Meaning and making go together —culture, you could say, is the activity of making meaning.
Andy Crouch was the staff leader for the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship group while I was in college, and I've always appreciated his insights about what it means to be a Christian. He challenged me (and the other students) to think more critically about our faith, and my time in college was a period of significant growth spiritually, largely thanks to Andy and other IVCF leaders.
Culture Making sprung out of Andy's work on the Christian Vision Project (also called "Where Faith and Culture Meet") and is a challenge to Christians to think about culture a little differently. The church commonly takes one of four stances towards culture: condemning, critiquing, copying, or consuming. But while these may sometimes be appropriate gestures, Andy argues that the church's posture toward culture should usually be cultivating and creating.
It's hard for me to sum up the book since so much of it bears repeating. I'd love to read through this book again with others and discuss the ideas in it; a lot of it reminds me of a Gospel and the Arts class I took a couple years ago but goes one step further. I found it particularly helpful as a Christian and an artist, but Andy's definition of "culture" extends beyond just what we would call "art" and into all aspects of human life.
If you want to check out some of the ideas behind the book, you can go to Culture-Making.com. (My friend Nate helps write entries for the blog so I'd been keeping up with the website even before I actually read the book.)
Fed to jonathan's brain | February 18, 2009
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