Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

There is another way to approach power. Rather than seeking to build our way up to the pinnacle of power, we can make the move that God invites us to make: to see ourselves, in relationship to the world’s Creator, as in possession of more power than we could ever dream. Exodus and resurrection, the most dramatic divine interventions in history, bot

And it seems certain that every cultural artifact will have to undergo a radical transformation of some sort—just as gold, translucent when beaten, will become capable of transparency. The best parallel, it seems, may be what Scripture instructs us to expect for our own bodies. We too, after all, will have to undergo a humbling and a judgment, and

Culture, then, is the furniture of heaven.

Consider this a parable of cultural change, illustrating this fundamental rule: The only way to change culture is to create more of it.

Is it possible to participate in culture, to create culture, outside of the church and experience every bit as much divine multiplication as those who work inside the church? For centuries many Christians would have answered no. A few had “vocations”—a word that still today, in Catholic contexts, refers to a specifically religious life—and the rest

one thing the language of “changing the world” usually lacks: humility, defined not so much as bashfulness about our own abilities as awed and quiet confidence in God’s ability. Is the Maker of the world still at work “changing the world”? If so, what are the patterns of his activity, and what would it mean to join him in what he is doing in every

We cannot make culture without culture. And this means that creation begins with cultivation—taking care of the good things that culture has already handed on to us. The first responsibility of culture makers is not to make something new but to become fluent in the cultural tradition to which we are responsible. Before we can be culture makers, we

It should not be too surprising that consumption is an ineffective way to bring cultural change, because consumption is completely dependent on the existence of cultural goods to consume in the first place. The only way to motivate a large enough bloc of consumers to act in a way that really shapes the horizons of possibility and impossibility, in

Frederick Buechner writes that your calling is found “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”