I’m behind in my reviews for Andy Crouch’s book Culture Making, so here’s my overdue discussion of chapter 3, “Teardowns, Technology and Change.”

In this chapter, Crouch critiques dominant views of how cultural change comes about: progress and revolution. The problem with the myth of progress is that many of our most important cultural goods cannot be improved. They can be changed, but how does one measure improvement to things such as language? The English language has grown and evolved over the years, but is it any better or worse than the language used by the Saxons? They were certainly able to communicate and make sense of their world using the language they possessed even if it had just a fraction of the vocabulary we have today. Instead of progress, Crouch suggests we evaluate cultural change through integrity. “We can speak of progress when a certain arena of culture is more whole, more faithful to the world of which it is making something.” (54)

Crouch establishes that cultural change has two key components: the “speed of change” and the “longevity of impact.” (56) He argues that often, the faster a layer of culture changes, the less likely that its influence will last that long. Conversely, “any change that will profoundly move the horizons of possibility and impossibility will almost always, by definition, take lots of time. The bigger the change we hope for, the longer we must be willing to invest, work and wait for it.” (56-57)

The second assumed means of cultural change Crouch addresses is revolution. Most revolutions have a desire to tear down some system or structure that currently exists. More often than not, they do not have an alternative to put into place after the demolition is complete. Thus, revolutions move at great speeds, but they often do not have long lasting effects. Those “overnight” revolutions that were successful often had a long history leading up to the tipping point. “Nothing that matters, no matter how sudden, does not have a long history and take part in a long future.” (58) Crouch uses the example of Jesus’ resurrection as an event that did not change much in the immediate moment, but few can deny it has become the most culturally significant event in history.

Finally, Crouch adeptly looks at the idea that culture is merely a worldview, a means of thinking. If culture is only or mostly a worldview, then the primary means of engagement and change is analysis. To change culture, one needs to look at all its parts and form a new way of thinking. Crouch thinks this is backwards. “The language of worldview tends to imply…that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking.” (64) He uses the interstate system as his example in that it was not just a result of thinking differently about the world, but the interstate system was itself “a new way of viewing the world.”

I feel like crawling into a cave for a spell with all that’s happening in the world, the market, and my life right now. Communing with raccoons might bring some welcome respite, though I hear they’re stingy.

When I was preparing my sermon on the resurrected Jesus meeting the disciples and sending them out in John, I reread some of Miroslav Volf’s amazing book, Exclusion and Embrace. The following quotation has been swimming in my head since:

The ability to know the truth is not just a matter of what your mind does—whether it adjusts itself adequately to reality or thinks coherently—but is also a matter of what your character is. (269)

This post may be a few months early, but I think it is appropriate that we begin thinking of such things now. When January 20, 2009 rolls around, let us remember that whoever is president won’t have had even twenty-four hours on the job. We may think that either Barack Obama or John McCain would make for a terrible or a great leader now, but when one of them enters office in a few months, our praises and criticisms will need to be tempered by the fact that they won’t have that much of a presidential record to show. I ask, regardless of whomever is the next president, that rather than letting our current opinions of them predetermine how we will see their early decisions, we would let their new record speak for itself. Can we give our new leader a chance in their new role before crowning them a success or condemning them as a failure?

Let us continue to debate which candidate would make for the best president. We must ask hard questions of the candidates and their running mates. We must also ask hard questions of each other, challenging our positions with civility and respect. Let us commit to praying that whoever wins would be wise and just.

Stumbling across perhaps the greatest ruling from an NFL penalty. It came from referee Ben Dreith in a 1986 game between the Jets and Bills. I don’t remember ever seeing it before. Enjoy the creativity and eloquence.

A year ago tonight, as I lay in bed, reading James Michener’s novel, The Source, my mother called telling me that she and my brother were driving to St. Agnes hospital in Fresno. My father was in an ambulance experiencing major chest pains. At the hospital he would suffer a major heart attack and die at 3:16 the next morning.

As of tomorrow, it will have been a full year of mourning my father’s death. Without question this has been the hardest year of my life. I’ve tried to make sense of death, but ultimately, it is beyond my grasp. My hope in this time is to relish in the memories, press into relationships I have, and to trust, however faintly, Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15.54: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

As the months have passed, I have found a sense of responsibility regarding the dead. I realize now, that in many ways, the dead belong to the living. Their continuation in this life depends on those who knew them telling their stories again and again. If this is true, then I feel a great duty—not to speak on Dad’s behalf, but to present him as honestly as I can. Many of those who read this will have only known my father through the stories I told about him. He is no longer able to create new memories with his friends and family. By words or actions, he cannot contradict or correct what we say about him. Who he is now to the rest of the world oddly depends on what we say about him. It is the responsibility of the living to carry and represent the dead.

I don’t want to air out Dad’s dirty laundry. Neither do I want to write his hagiography. My father was a remarkable man and still a human, full of the wonderful contradictions that give mystery to this life. He was both generous and protective at the same time. He could make judgments of a person based on their appearance and remained open to having his opinions changed. I marveled at his patience and grew frustrated with his short temper.

Early in the grieving, Carey and I promised each other that we wouldn’t put on the “strong face,” but would try to be as present to whatever we felt at any given moment, no matter how against the grain those emotions might seem. Lately, I’ve wanted direct my grief a bit more, without trying to prescribe the process. I’ve begun a gratitude journal wherein I record things that happened during the day for which I am thankful—something Robert Emmons, a psychology professor of mine at UC Davis recommended. I also write down what I am thankful for with Dad, because I believe at its core, my grief exists because I have lost someone who makes me thankful. Dad may not be here to create new memories, but I want him to continue to be a part of my life and I can think of no better way to do that than to remember him to others and to myself as I live.

In “Cultural Worlds,” the second chapter of Culture Making, Andy Crouch further explains his understanding of the terms culture and culture making. Culture, he says, “requires a public.” (38) That is, for an artifact or a tangible good to become culture, it cannot remain a private product—it must be received by others. T. S. Eliot’s disillusioned poetic masterpiece, “The Waste Land” is therefore culture, whereas the overly metaphorical poem you wrote in the tenth grade raging against the conformity imposed by “the system” with which you meant to impress the girl across the room in geometry and then burned when she went to winter semi-formal dance with someone else, is not culture. “Culture making is people (plural) making something of the world.” (40)

Crouch helpfully describes cultures as having scales and spheres, that is, different cultures have limits and different sizes. The most basic and most powerful culture is the family unit. So if we are to change culture or make culture, we must know what sphere or scale of culture we address. The smaller the culture, the easier it is to make lasting change. To change the English language is difficult, whereas changing your family’s dinner rituals is much easier.

Because the way the world has changed with communication and transportation, most people are no longer born into one culture where they will likely remain. Instead, most people have become cultural immigrants, often “in pursuit of economic or political opportunities.” Christians who have become immigrants “in pursuit of evangelistic or religious opportunities” are called missionaries. “But as the wheels within culture overlap more and more in a mobile world, most of us have some choice about which cultures we will call our own. We are almost all immigrants now, and more of us than we may realize are missionaries too.” (48-49) I would argue that all Christians are missionaries.

NPR is streaming the entirety of Radiohead’s August 28 concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl. I’ve only seen them perform live once, back in 1998, and I missed their recent Southern California shows. Thanks to NPR for providing us with the opportunity to hear these geniuses.

Today’s Google search: clean dog after skunk.

Eddy has created an online book club of sorts to discuss Andy Crouch’s new work, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. I first encountered Crouch’s writing when he wrote for and edited the excellent, but now defunct magazine re:genereation Quarterly. The jacket of Culture Making’s states, “It is not enough to condemn culture. Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture, copy culture or consume culture. The only way to change culture is to create culture.” This post will discuss the book’s introduction and first chapter.

Introduction:
Crouch says that Christians and their relation to culture have been in the stages of childhood or youth. Childhood’s essence is innocence and youth’s essence is awareness. He calls us to become adults with regard to culture and the essence of adulthood is responsibility. The Church has gone from innocence of culture to awareness of it and we seem to enjoy that place where we can critique and engage. But Crouch believes we need to be at the task of making culture.

Many criticized H. Richard Neibuhr’s seminal work, Christ and Culture for not offering a definition of culture, and Crouch tries to avoid that mistake. He says, “We talk about culture as if it were primarily a set of ideas when it is primarily a set of tangible goods.” (10) He also discloses his influences, namely the Dutch Reformed theologian turned statesman Abraham Kuyper who called people to cultural responsibility. I have Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism somewhere, but I haven’t read it yet.

For Crouch, culture needs to be created in the power of God. “Culture is not finally about us, but about God.” (13)