Culture Making

My apologies — a 13-month old can drain every last ounce of creativity left over from work, leaving me shriveled up and pruned for content. New posts are hard to come by. But I still keep up with reading (more passive . . . *grin*), yet the reviews languish in their own section of this blog. So I’m going to start posting my reviews as well, and this is a great book to start with.

Also, I’ve been waiting for the author of the wonderful Now Reading plugin to allow readers to comment on reviews. I’ve been waiting for almost a year; no luck yet. So I’ll duplicate them as posts for now, and if you’ve read the book (or decide to read because of this review), I’d love to hear your comments as well. And I take book reading suggestions. It’s now a virtual book club of sorts!

To see other reviews, click here to go to the library. So here goes:

This book is simply amazing. The premise alone is worth the cost of the book: if you want to change culture, critiquing it or consuming more of it won’t do. You have to make more of it.

But there’s more far more value than just that one idea. The book’s large in scope (what is culture?), clear in thought (what exactly goes into shaping culture?), sharp in intellect (who’s thought about the culture-making possibilities of an omelet?), humble in spirit (because we really can’t change the world, but. . . ) and hopeful in tone (. . . God can and is doing something.) It shows us both how we can’t change the world — thus, our need for humility — and yet, how we can still participate in the culture making enterprise in Christ.

Add the author’s skillful command of the language and mix in more wonderful concrete illustrations and examples, and the result is a brilliant and satisfying read.

You can view its Amazon detail page by clicking the image above.

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4 Comments

  1. Sounds like a great book! It’s good to have your expert opinion on what is worth reading. I’m intrigued by the seemingly implicit assumption that we should all want to change the WORLD (I’ll use all caps to denote the totality of human existence and lowercase for our immediate environment). The WORLD is in need of changing, no doubt. I wonder how common is this desire to have such a broad impact? Is it a function of the increase in WORLD-wide communication and influence that we observe on the internet and TV? How many people fail to change their world because they recognize they won’t have an impact on the WORLD?

    In any case, it sounds like this book might address some of these questions, as making on omelet (or a frittata?) is really more of a world-changing activity than a WORLD-changing one.

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  2. Glad you recommend it as well James. I’m actually hosting an online/virtual book club (through my blog) for anyone interested in reading this book together in the month of September. I’ve heard great reviews for the book, so I look forward to learning from Crouch…

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  3. i ordered it.

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  4. Doug — there does seem to be a desire for larger impact in American youth culture, whether because of altruism or celebrity and technology definitely allows for greater impact. But your questions are definitely addressed, and Andy does a great job at it.

    Eddy — that sounds cool. I’ll stop by to see how it shapes up.

    Mark — hope you find it as helpful as I did. =)

    Reply

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