Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

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

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

Mouw properly asks how this can be, given that both Isaiah and John in Revelation specifically prophesy God’s condemnation of pagan cultural goods, not least the ships of Tarshish (which God promises to “shatter” in Psalm 48:7). But this condemnation is a matter not of their intrinsic value but of the idolatrous function that they have come to play

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

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

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

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

And then, after contemplation, the artist and the gardener both adopt a posture of purposeful work. They bring their creativity and effort to their calling. The gardener tends what has gone before, making the most of what is beautiful and weeding out what is distracting or useless. The artist can be more daring: she starts with a blank canvas or a

Culture, then, is the furniture of heaven.