Power/less

When God acts in culture, he uses both the powerful and the powerless alongside one another rather than using one against the other. To mobilize the powerless against the powerful would be revolution; to mobilize the powerful against the powerless would simply confirm "the way of the world." But to bring them into partnership is the true sign of God's paradoxical and graceful intervention into the human story.

Andy Crouch
Culture Making

Check out a shortish review of this book in an earlier post.

Leadership's Golden Canon

Leadership is presenting a list of the ten books of 2008 they've decided are most useful for church leaders. They're not all books specifically relating to leadership as such, but rather titles that would help a leader in two areas: The Leader's Inner World, and The Leader's Outer World.

The titles were compiled from submissions by a diverse group of more than 100 pastors from across the country. Leadership's contributing editors then voted to determine the winners in the two categories.

The list is here. Among the titles I'm pleased to see N T Wright's Surprised by Hope, Andy Crouch's Culture Making, and the third in Eugene Peterson's recent series of books on the Christian life: The Jesus Way.

Thought-provoking shorts

On the qideas.org site, there's a section called 'shorts'. These are essays that provide a thoughtful perspective on an important topic about faith and culture. You can preview any one of the titles, and if you like something, you can purchase it for your library and print it out. Or come back later and read online.
These shorts include a piece by Kathleen Falsani called: The Thread: when church happens online, and it begins with a Facebook experience in which Falsani learned that a good friend had died.
Tim Keel talks about not limiting the gospel, Andy Crouch about consumerism, Andrew Martin on bridging the gap between Christians and gays, Josh Jackson and Nick Purdy discuss finding the good in popular culture. There are about twenty titles to choose from and they cost US$5 each to buy.

Making It New

In his review of Andy Crouch's new book, Culture Making: recovering our creative calling, Gideon Strauss writes:

[Andy] Crouch argues that American Christians adopted broadly four stances in relation to culture during the course of the 20th century, in each case taking an appropriate gesture toward certain elements of culture and inappropriately expanding it into a comprehensive posture toward the common culture in general. While some cultural products (like sex trafficking) demand outright condemnation from Christians, a posture of condemnation fails to account for the goodness of culture, warps Christian testimony to hope and mercy, facilitates hypocrisy, and—particularly in response to artistic works—comes across as "shrill and silly." Critique, by contrast, is an entirely appropriate response to works of art, the more so the better the art. But a posture of critique diminishes the delight to be taken in many good products of culture, and encourages a certain kind of cultural passivity that overemphasizes analysis and underappreciates participation and production. A pot of tea, a loaf of bread—the best first response to these is savoring consumption. But a posture of consumption limits us to living "unthinkingly within a culture's preexisting horizons of possibility and impossibility." Consumerism is capitulation to the existing culture at a deep level, allowing our very identity to be defined by what we can purchase. Copying from a culture is, at best, a recognition of "the lesson of Pentecost that every human language, every human cultural form, is capable of bearing the good news." But copying as a posture produces inauthentic, dated, and tame results.

Instead, Crouch says, the cultural postures Christians should adopt are those of cultivation and creation. Cultivators are "people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done." And creators are "people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful."

Andy Crouch has a blog site, also called Culture Making