Sublime

Problem

3 percent

At most

of the American population, their influence has become enormous; again far disproportionate to their size.

As James Davison Hunter puts it in his brilliant analysis The Death of Character, “There have never been ‘generic’ values.”13 Virtues are thick realities tethered to particular communities governed by a particular Story.

I adopt Hunter’s “faithfully present within” culture approach, augmented by Andy Crouch’s insight that Christians are called to be creators and cultivators of the good, true, and beautiful. Alternative accounts of cultural apologetics could be developed that explicitly endorse one or another of Niebuhr’s possible positions on Christ and culture.

the future of the church is ancient:

As James Davison Hunter, the country’s leading scholar on character education, put it, “American culture is defined more and more by an absence, and in that absence, we provide children with no moral horizons beyond the self and its well-being.” Religious institutions, which used to do this, began to play a less prominent role in American life. Par