The remarkable fact, however, is that Hollywood is changing—and not because of condemnation, critique, copying or consumption. It is changing because a relatively small group of people—perhaps a few thousand at most, many of them directly or indirectly influenced by Nicolosi’s screenwriters training program Act One—have invested their energy, creat

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

Culture, then, is the furniture of heaven.

It is simply not true, according to Isaiah and John—and according to the whole sweep of the biblical story from beginning to end—that “souls” are the only eternal things or that human beings are all that last into eternity. To be sure, cultural goods without creators and cultivators would be inert and useless. But human beings, in God’s original in

We should ask the same question about our own cultural creativity and cultivating. Are we creating and cultivating things that have a chance of furnishing the new Jerusalem? Will the cultural goods we devote our lives to—the food we cook and consume, the music we purchase and practice, the movies we watch and make, the enterprises we earn our paych

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

or, worse, we will end more sure of ourselves and less sure of God. I am also convinced that culture is sufficiently broken that none of us can simply afford to marinate in privilege, enjoying the fruits of power at a time when Christians have reentered the cultural mainstream and many of us have access to the best that a prosperous society can off

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

What was missing, I’ve come to believe, were the two postures that are most characteristically biblical—the two postures that have been least explored by Christians in the last century. They are found at the very beginning of the human story, according to Genesis: like our first parents, we are to be creators and cultivators. Or to put it more poet