Culture Makers

The Pleasures and Perils of Fermentation

{Alcohol, shame, nakedness, and grace.}

What would you say to 1500 students at a Christian college, sitting in their biweekly required chapel service, as the guest speaker at the beginning of “Alcohol Awareness Week”? Here’s what I said—after two Scripture readings from Genesis 9 (Noah’s episode of drunkenness a few narrative moments after getting off the Ark) and John 2 (Jesus’ first sign at the wedding at Cana). As with all talks, it falls short of my standards for writing, but it still seems worth sharing. Cheers.

I have this feeling that I’ve been given a nearly impossible speaking assignment. Shane Claiborne was here on Tuesday, and I’m just not nearly as interesting as Shane. Shane lives in radical community in one of Philadelphia’s grittiest neighborhoods; I live in a cozy little suburb of Philadelphia with two kids in a lovely single-family home. I do not have nor have I ever had dreadlocks. I do not have a cool East Tennessee accent. And I do not make my own clothes. We may all be in for a boring time. Plus I’m here as part of Alcohol Awareness Week, and surely there is nothing so truly deadly as a speaker you’ve never met trying to make you “aware” of “alcohol.”

The only things I have going for me—the only things we have going for us—are these two crazy stories from the pages of Scripture. Two stories that give us two very different pictures of what alcohol means for people who want to be biblical people, who want to follow this story all the way to its surprise ending.

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Rx for Excess

{Serving God and saving the planet.}

As our family sits together, eyes closed, we say grace. Today it’s Timothy’s turn. “God, thank you so much for all we have,” he begins in what turns into a typically prolix nine-year-old’s prayer. Eventually he is done—"in Jesus’ name, Amen"—and I turn the key. We have just filled up our car with gasoline.

There is just one reason we are saying grace at the gas station: a few months ago I read J. Matthew Sleeth’s book Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action, which very sensibly suggests that if Christians bless God for food, we also ought to bless him for fossil fuels. Those of us who say grace at restaurants know the discomfort one feels bringing a visible expression of religious gratitude into a public place. I can testify that it’s stranger still in a gas station, where one becomes aware just how unprayerful the act of pumping gas normally is. Unlike a well-prepared meal, gasoline does not prompt gratitude unbidden. The stuff is smelly, dangerous, and not at all self-evidently good in itself. It is a means to my ends, juice for a momentary sense of power and control. It is surprisingly hard to remember to stop and say thanks before I pull out, a little too quickly, into traffic.

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Feeling Green

{Whose religious environmentalism?}

Early in my college career, the distinguished literary critic Wayne Booth paid a visit to a class in which I had managed to wangle a seat. The text of the week was Booth’s Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, an attempt to rescue reasoned discourse from the clutches of corrosive modern skepticism. Asked a question about a point on one particular page, Booth borrowed the teaching assistant’s copy to check the exact wording. He looked up in surprise, a slight smile on his face, and said, “I see that the owner of this book has written in the margin, ‘Bullshit.’”

As the graduate student in question turned bright red and the rest of us laughed out loud, I noticed that Booth seemed strangely satisfied. Someone was paying attention, even if they didn’t exactly respond with “the rhetoric of assent.”

I can only hope that Roger Gottlieb is half as indulgent as the late Dr. Booth should he ever come across my copy of his book A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future. While I believe the marginalia are free of scatology, they do betray a fair amount of frustration. There are few causes in which I would more hope a writer to succeed, and there are few books that strike me as more likely to injure the cause, at least among one pivotal constituency: the evangelical Christians who, if books like Gottlieb’s can be kept from doing too much damage, may yet become the decisive constituency for environmental stewardship in the 21st century.

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Being Culture Makers

{An interview with “StudentSoul.”}

The online magazine StudentSoul interviewed me recently about cultural creativity, why we can’t settle for cultural critique, and how college students can prepare for a life of creating culture.

What does “culture-making” mean and how might it go hand in hand with or differ from “cultural transformation”?

Cultural transformation is something that a lot of Christians talk about and aspire to. We want to be a part of transforming the culture. The question is, how is culture transformed? Does it happen just because we think more about culture, or because we pay more attention to culture? As I was thinking about cultural transformation I became convinced that culture changes when people actually make more and better culture. If we want to transform culture, what we actually have to do is to get into the midst of the human cultural project and create some new cultural goods that reshape the way people imagine and experience their world. So culture-making answers the “how” question rather than just “what” we are about. We seek the transformation of every culture but how we do it is by actually making culture.

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The Importance of Knowing What’s Unimportant

{Being a counterculture for the common good begins with what we choose to focus on—and to overlook.}

The Christian Vision Project begins each year with a big question. In 2006, we asked, How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?

We knew from the start that any set of articles, no matter how compelling, would provide an inadequate answer. Every how eventually has to be lived out by a who. Making sense of our moment in history, in other words, requires us to make a wise choice of heroes. Fortunately, over the course of 2006, we found one.

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The Culturally Creative Church

{An interview with Infuze Magazine.}

Infuze Magazine is an online journal of Christians and cultural creativity. Their editor Matt Conner interviewed me by email, showing tremendous patience in waiting for my replies, over the past year. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about culture-making and the church.

I’ve read an article of yours in which you discuss the idea of differing generations pushing for key influencers in culture in differing areas. The older generation pushes for Christians in political leadership to influence culture, while the younger tends to push for influencers in entertainment. Can you describe this further? Is there a problem with this?

Let’s remember that forty years ago, white evangelical Christians were largely disengaged from culture in general. [And from now on, when I say “Christians,” I’m going to be talking about white evangelical Protestants. Little of what we’re saying here will be true of Catholics, mainline Protestants, or black Christians.] They had a strong, not to say rigid, dichotomy between the sacred and the secular, between the church and the world. Both in rhetoric and reality, Christians simply didn’t connect their faith, conceived largely as saving souls for heaven, with any kind of cultural activity.

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