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amaranthine_dragon's review
4.0
loved it! had some really good thoughts that I want to reread and process.
jbrundage's review against another edition
5.0
“Christians breathless rhetoric about changing the world is usually them just changing the subject.”
Yep.
Yep.
adamrshields's review
5.0
Short review: This is a great book. If you work in a creative field or in a church job or many other social service areas you should read this book. The first section is mostly social science discussion of culture (not a boring one). But there is a lot about what culture really is, why we as a church should be involved. What it really means to impact culture. And there is a good bit of discussion about the limits of breaking out of our culture and the limits of how much impact we really can have over our culture. I have reach the classic H Richard Niebuhr "Christ and Culture" and many others like them. This is the best of the whole genre. I will read it again soon.
Full review on my blog at http://www.mrshields.com/culture-making-recovering-our-creative-calling-by-andy-crouch/
Full review on my blog at http://www.mrshields.com/culture-making-recovering-our-creative-calling-by-andy-crouch/
librarytech4's review against another edition
5.0
This book did a great job of explaining and demonstrating how Christians should look at missions and what they can do to change to world around them for Christ. Crouch explains that things like boycotting movies or other media alone does not help. Christians need to be creating and promoting media that glorifies Christ and his mission if we want to see the world make a change toward Christ.
bcbartuska's review
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
Thank you Netgalley and Intervarsity Press for the advanced review copy of an updated and expanded edition of Culture Making by Andy Crouch. The new version includes an afterward with Tish Harrison Warren that is helpful in thinking through how culture making is different today than when the first edition of the book released.
What an excellent overview of the topic of culture. This is a book I will be thinking about for a long time.
Though it is a bit academic in tone, it is worth the time and effort. Andy Crouch helps us to consider what culture actually means, how we are meant to interact with it, and how our creating can be done to the glory of God.
I have many takeaways, but just as a brief snapshot, here are a few:
—Most culture making fails. Do it anyway.
—God is the original culture maker.
—As Christians, we are called to more than simply criticizing our surrounding culture.
—We will enjoy fully redeemed culture in the new heaves and the new earth.
The expanded edition releases September 12. All opinions are my own.
davehershey's review
5.0
Fantastic. Crouch diagnoses four ways evangelical Christians have related to culture: condemn, critique, copy, consume. Although each of this may be appropriate for particular things, as a way of relating to culture as a whole they are unsatisfying. Instead Christians should be creating and cultivating culture. Crouch grounds this in the Bible story, from creation on through Jesus Christ and into new creation.
I found this book thought-provoking and challenging. I think all Christians in the arts should read it and take up the challenge to create good art (not just "Christian art"). Too much in the Christian subculture is just a copy (oh you like this secular band, try this Christian one that sounds just like them but does not swear). I thought his analysis of critiquing culture was good, showing that Christians who take that path are good art critics but not good artists. That said, it seems that the evangelical Christians I spend time around are more likely to just consume culture. Whatever is popular we just take in without a second thought. Perhaps we see meaning spelled out for us in a movie like Lion, Witch and Wardrobe but we miss the more subtle messages in say, Gran Torino.
Crouch is doing more than just talking about the arts. This is a book about vocation, the Christian call to create and cultivate culture in whatever field we find ourselves. For that reason, every college student who is a Christian should read it. I believe I will be coming back to this book often.
I found this book thought-provoking and challenging. I think all Christians in the arts should read it and take up the challenge to create good art (not just "Christian art"). Too much in the Christian subculture is just a copy (oh you like this secular band, try this Christian one that sounds just like them but does not swear). I thought his analysis of critiquing culture was good, showing that Christians who take that path are good art critics but not good artists. That said, it seems that the evangelical Christians I spend time around are more likely to just consume culture. Whatever is popular we just take in without a second thought. Perhaps we see meaning spelled out for us in a movie like Lion, Witch and Wardrobe but we miss the more subtle messages in say, Gran Torino.
Crouch is doing more than just talking about the arts. This is a book about vocation, the Christian call to create and cultivate culture in whatever field we find ourselves. For that reason, every college student who is a Christian should read it. I believe I will be coming back to this book often.
adamschoenmaker's review
4.0
Very helpful, especially in providing a framework for understanding the somewhat nebulous concept of 'culture'. At times it felt a little bloated, like Crouch had tried to cram in a bit too much, but overall it was insightful, at least for me.
elianachow's review against another edition
2.0
Disclaimer: Theologically, I write this from a Calvinist/Presbyterian background, with a fair share of other spiritual convictions by nature of my discipline and education, all of which inform my stance on some of the issues addressed here. Academically, you can take Eliana out of the English major but you can't take the English major out of Eliana. Socially and culturally I am... not white, even though I was born in this here 'Murica. So here I am trying to articulate why I spent more time understanding why I disagreed with Crouch than I spent actually reading the book.
1) After a good deal of frowning and rereading, I still do not understand what the author's "concrete definition" of culture is, even though he kept saying "now that we have a concrete definition of such and such." He very clearly comes from a particular racial, social, geographical, and theological background, which is not inherently bad (we all come from our own particulars), but can be dangerous when bias and personally limited understandings of "culture" and "place" are misused or go unacknowledged. You can also really tell at certain points that this book was written over a decade ago by a particular man for a particular audience; the author uses phrases, assumptions, sayings, stereotypes, descriptors, etc. that simply would not fly these days in the hands of a socially aware audience, even if an oblivious editor wouldn't catch them.
2) Even though he does eventually come back around to topics of grace, Crouch gives an awful lot of credit to human works, which I fundamentally disagree with. He builds a hefty share of the making side of his arguments on the premise that humans take part in creating new things, even going so far as to claim an ex nihilo "quality" of human creativity. His defense aganist another common theology of art and making — that human creative efforts are more liminal, responsive, exploratory, etc. — is vague and dismissive, taking up a mere paragraph and featuring questionably mystic metaphors about language making. A little mysticism is great — helps us break out of some otherwise stiff church boxes, which I appreciate both as a writer and a worshipper — but take it too far and you lean heavily on the human experience of God rather than God's own revelation.
That said, one of the reasons why I'm giving this two stars instead of less is because there's a forgiveable amount of nuance to this grace point in his chapter on "Why We Can't Change the World," give or take yet another argument that could have been structured better. But that doesn't come up until Chapter 12 (and 16), and meanwhile this entirely different foundation has been laid.
3) Crouch has a lot of ideas about the culture of heaven (and thus the cultures of earth) that I'm not sure are as soundly backed up by scripture as might seem. He's not the first academic/pastor figure I've encountered who believes that what we create on this earth will ascend to a more purified and whole state in heaven. It's a nice idea, but I'd be interested to know how that fits into the biblical reality that heaven and earth will pass away and that God himself will create anew. Does what we create have a soul? No. So I'm not sure we can put resurrection of culture into quite the same box as resurrection of the body. I'll have to look into that more. But in a similar vein, Crouch argues that we are actively in the process of building and contributing to heaven's culture while we are still on earth. But I wonder if we are instead practicing or otherwise being... idk... sanctified?? for that day? What if the work is not as much about the work as it is about our own salvation and the salvation of those who are likewise impacted by our work? God-given is good, but toward what glorified end? What or who is glorified?
4) The writing is also not that engaging. I think this is the first arts/culture/theology book I've read so far that has had me bored within the first couple chapters. While I'm at it, there's a chapter where he call his own point a "key insight." No, sir. That is reserved for summaries and annotations of other people's work. Not your own in your own book. Smh.
Where the language is actually good comes in his careful perusal and exploration of the different historical contexts of cultural passages in the Bible. To cater to that strength, this book should have been primarily a study of culture-making throughout the Bible, with maybe a chapter or two at the end drawing out some of the implications for us as makers in the present, focusing specifically on the resurrection and John's Revelation.
5) In the end, this book does not pass the "would I read this on the train and hope someone asks me about it?" test. I did try to read a few chapters on said mode of transportation, but the more I disagreed with the test the more terrified I became that someone would ask what I was reading.
If you made it this far, huzzah. There were probably typos; don't tell me about them.
1) After a good deal of frowning and rereading, I still do not understand what the author's "concrete definition" of culture is, even though he kept saying "now that we have a concrete definition of such and such." He very clearly comes from a particular racial, social, geographical, and theological background, which is not inherently bad (we all come from our own particulars), but can be dangerous when bias and personally limited understandings of "culture" and "place" are misused or go unacknowledged. You can also really tell at certain points that this book was written over a decade ago by a particular man for a particular audience; the author uses phrases, assumptions, sayings, stereotypes, descriptors, etc. that simply would not fly these days in the hands of a socially aware audience, even if an oblivious editor wouldn't catch them.
2) Even though he does eventually come back around to topics of grace, Crouch gives an awful lot of credit to human works, which I fundamentally disagree with. He builds a hefty share of the making side of his arguments on the premise that humans take part in creating new things, even going so far as to claim an ex nihilo "quality" of human creativity. His defense aganist another common theology of art and making — that human creative efforts are more liminal, responsive, exploratory, etc. — is vague and dismissive, taking up a mere paragraph and featuring questionably mystic metaphors about language making. A little mysticism is great — helps us break out of some otherwise stiff church boxes, which I appreciate both as a writer and a worshipper — but take it too far and you lean heavily on the human experience of God rather than God's own revelation.
That said, one of the reasons why I'm giving this two stars instead of less is because there's a forgiveable amount of nuance to this grace point in his chapter on "Why We Can't Change the World," give or take yet another argument that could have been structured better. But that doesn't come up until Chapter 12 (and 16), and meanwhile this entirely different foundation has been laid.
3) Crouch has a lot of ideas about the culture of heaven (and thus the cultures of earth) that I'm not sure are as soundly backed up by scripture as might seem. He's not the first academic/pastor figure I've encountered who believes that what we create on this earth will ascend to a more purified and whole state in heaven. It's a nice idea, but I'd be interested to know how that fits into the biblical reality that heaven and earth will pass away and that God himself will create anew. Does what we create have a soul? No. So I'm not sure we can put resurrection of culture into quite the same box as resurrection of the body. I'll have to look into that more. But in a similar vein, Crouch argues that we are actively in the process of building and contributing to heaven's culture while we are still on earth. But I wonder if we are instead practicing or otherwise being... idk... sanctified?? for that day? What if the work is not as much about the work as it is about our own salvation and the salvation of those who are likewise impacted by our work? God-given is good, but toward what glorified end? What or who is glorified?
4) The writing is also not that engaging. I think this is the first arts/culture/theology book I've read so far that has had me bored within the first couple chapters. While I'm at it, there's a chapter where he call his own point a "key insight." No, sir. That is reserved for summaries and annotations of other people's work. Not your own in your own book. Smh.
Where the language is actually good comes in his careful perusal and exploration of the different historical contexts of cultural passages in the Bible. To cater to that strength, this book should have been primarily a study of culture-making throughout the Bible, with maybe a chapter or two at the end drawing out some of the implications for us as makers in the present, focusing specifically on the resurrection and John's Revelation.
5) In the end, this book does not pass the "would I read this on the train and hope someone asks me about it?" test. I did try to read a few chapters on said mode of transportation, but the more I disagreed with the test the more terrified I became that someone would ask what I was reading.
If you made it this far, huzzah. There were probably typos; don't tell me about them.