Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

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

Christian culture making grows through networks, but it is not a matter of networking. It is a matter of community—a relatively small group of people whose common life is ordered by love. Love is a fragile thing that does not scale well. It seems small beside the towers of Babel and Babylon. It is like a mustard seed, tiny and seemingly vulnerable.

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

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

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

Is there a way to change the world without falling into one of the many traps laid for would-be world changers? If so, it will require us to learn the

I believe the single best question for discerning our calling—the specific cultural sphere and scale where we and our communities of 3, 12 and 120 are called to cultivate and create—is Where do you experience grace—divine multiplication that far exceeds your efforts?

I have become convinced that little good comes from straining to “change the culture.” To do so is indeed, as the sociologists would say, to grant human beings too much agency. We will end our efforts to change the world exhausted and spent, less sure of ourselves and less sure of God—or,