{"id":640,"date":"2008-09-09T18:08:24","date_gmt":"2008-09-10T01:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=640"},"modified":"2008-09-09T18:08:24","modified_gmt":"2008-09-10T01:08:24","slug":"christians-and-the-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2008\/09\/09\/christians-and-the-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Christians and "The Culture""},"content":{"rendered":"

Once in a while, the Introduction of a book has me shouting “yes” right from the start.\u00a0 Such is the case with Andy Crouch’s Culture Making:\u00a0 Recovering Our Creative Calling<\/a>.\u00a0 This paragraph in particular stated some things I have been thinking for a long time:<\/p>\n

We talk about ‘the culture’ even though culture is always cultures, plural:\u00a0 full of diversity, variety and history.\u00a0 We talk about ‘engaging,’ ‘impacting’ and ‘transforming the culture’ when in fact\u00a0the people who most carefully study culture tend to stress instead how much we are transformed by it.\u00a0 If we are to be at all responsible agents in the midst of culture, we need to learn new ways of speaking about what we are doing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes!!\u00a0 When I hear or read about “the culture,” it is like nails on a blackboard to me.\u00a0 We don’t inhabit “the <\/em>culture”; we constitute and are part of many varied cultures, even within the seemingly homogenous world of middle class America.\u00a0 My friend who is a graduate student, another friend who is a contractor, another who is a doctor, and myself as a law professor, all are white (or maybe white, Asian, African-American, and other) middle class guys in suburbia, all worship at similar kinds of churches, but all participate in diverse cultures relating to our different family and professional experiences.<\/p>\n

Crouch continues:<\/p>\n

The worst thing we could do is follow that familiar advice to ‘pray as if it all depended on God, and work as if it all depended on you.’\u00a0 Rather, we need to become people who work as if it all depends on God — because it does, and because that is the best possible news.\u00a0 We work for, indeed work in the life and power of, a gracious and infinitely resourceful Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.\u00a0 And we know ourselves well enough that the thought that it might in fact all depend on us would drive us straight to fasting and trembling prayer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes again!\u00a0 I’m looking forward to chewing over this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once in a while, the Introduction of a book has me shouting “yes” right from the start.\u00a0 Such is the case with Andy Crouch’s Culture Making:\u00a0 Recovering Our Creative Calling.\u00a0 This paragraph in particular stated some things I have been thinking for a long time: We talk about ‘the culture’ even though culture is always […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-ak","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}