Make Culture Recommended Resources
Recommended Reading*
Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch
It is not enough to condemn culture. Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture or to copy culture. The only way to change culture is to create culture. Andy Crouch unleashes a stirring manifesto calling Christians to be culture makers. For too long, Christians have had an insufficient view of culture and have waged misguided “culture wars.” But we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators that God designed us to be. Culture is what we make of the world, both in creating cultural artifacts as well as in making sense of the world around us. By making chairs and omelets, languages and laws, we participate in the good work of culture making.
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Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life by Makoto Fujimura
This book issues a call to cultural stewardship, in which we become generative and feed our culture’s soul with beauty, creativity, and generosity. We serve others as cultural custodians of the future. This is a book for artists, but artists come in many forms. Anyone with a calling to create—from visual artists, musicians, writers, and actors to entrepreneurs, pastors, and business professionals—will resonate with its message. This book is for anyone with a desire or an artistic gift to reach across boundaries with understanding, reconciliation, and healing and who understand how much the culture we all share affects human thriving today and shapes the generations to come.
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The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon
One type of culture all of us will make is food. From a passionate and talented chef who also happens to be an Episcopalian priest comes this surprising and thought-provoking treatise on everything from prayer to poetry to puff pastry. In this book-lenth meditation on a single series of meals (“Lamb for Eight Persons Four Times”), Robert Farrar Capon talks about festal and ferial cooking, the deep spirituality of chopping onions, and the benefits and wonders of old-fashioned home cooking in a world of fast food and prepackaged cuisine.
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Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts by Steve Turner
Art can faithfully chronicle the lives of ordinary people and express the transcendence of God. And Christians should be involved in every level of the art world and in every medium. If Jesus is Lord of all life and creation, then art is part of his cultural mandate. It can and should be a way of expressing faith through creatively, beautifully, and truthfully arranged words, sounds, and sights.
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Recommended Teaching
Seek the Peace of the City
Pastor Jeremy Treat preaches a sermon from Jeremiah 29:1-7 examining what it means for us to be sent by God to the place we live, to put down roots in Los Angeles (no matter how long we’re here), and to seek the peace of our city.
WATCH OR LISTEN ➜
* While we may not agree with everything in every book we recommend, we think they are helpful resources to better understand Scripture and learn to follow Jesus in every area of life.
