Caring About Culture

Why should Christians care about culture? It’s a good question – and a complicated one, not least because we often define “culture” too narrowly.

In this interview over at QIdeas, author Andy Crouch thinks aloud about what culture actually is, and why it should matter to Christians:

I think the best way to think about cultures is not just one set of things like the arts, or like all the things in the world that bother us. Sometimes people talk about “the culture” and what they’re really thinking of is movies that bother them, or music whose lyrics they don’t like. Culture is way more than that, and I think the best way to think of it is everything that human beings make of the world. That includes the arts—it includes movies, television and film. But it also includes buildings, and clothing and food. It’s all of human activity, trying to make something of the world—make stuff, but also makes sense of the world. It’s the human quest to make something of the world.

Read the rest here (which includes a link to a video of the whole discussion).