Making culture

Andy Crouch's Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (IVP, 2008) is a good introduction to how Christians need to do more than fatalistically talk about the dangers of the world. Crouch praises Francis Schaeffer and others for emphasizing cultural engagement but notes that "the faculties that were most fully developed and valued were the ability to analyze and critique, not to actually sort out how to participate in the hurly-burly of cultural creativity . . . evangelicalism, so deeply influenced by the Schaeffers and their many protégés, still produces better art critics than artists."

Crouch is particularly helpful in showing readers how to ask five questions about man's creations ranging from omelets to highways: What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world is? What does it assume about the way the world should be? What does it make possible? What does it make impossible (or at least very difficult)? What new forms of culture are created in response to this artifact? The interstate highway system, for example, assumes a level of technology, wealth, and political unity; assumes the world should be smoother and faster; makes possible a car culture and further-out suburbs; etc.