Culture Making is now archived. Enjoy five years of reflections on culture worth celebrating.
For more about the book and Andy Crouch, please visit andy-crouch.com.

Posts tagged theology

22 March 2010

There is a God. There is no God. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am sure my love is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God, in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say that word.

—Simone Weil

9 September 2008
articleTo play and to pray —

A review of Jeremy Begbie’s Resounding Truth
This article by Andy Crouch originally appeared in PRISM Magazine, September–October 2008, p. 41.

For several years Baker Books has been releasing titles in its “Engaging Culture” series. These in-depth explorations of particular aspects of culture—film, popular music, business, environmentalism, and more—are almost always worth reading. But the latest volume in the series, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music, by the masterful English musician and theologian Jeremy Begbie, is a tour de force.

Begbie is not as well known in the United States as he should be—though that may be about to change,  now that he has joined the faculty of Duke Divinity School to inaugurate a program in theology in the arts. His 2000 book Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge University Press), which juxtaposes music theory with some of the knottiest problems in Christian philosophy, established him as an unusually creative theological voice.

Ultimately, though, Begbie is best experienced as a performer. His lectures, to use an unsuitably boring word, are unlike anything you’d expect from a Cambridge theologian: filled with visual art, accompanied by sound clips from many different musical cultures (jazz to Prokofiev to South African township songs), and punctuated by impromptu performances at the piano, all woven together with concise and memorable explorations of Christian Scripture and theology.

Read more . . .
24 July 2008
postGraduate-level culture making
by Andy Crouch for Culture Making

In 2008–2009 I will have the privilege of teaching two D.Min. courses on Christianity and cultural creativity, the first at Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon, and the second at Biblical Seminary here in the Philadelphia area.

Putting together the syllabus for my course at Western was a fun challenge. What 2,000 pages worth of reading would you select to give experienced pastors a thorough introduction to the best thinking on faith and culture, and to prompt their own creativity in the places where they live and serve?

Well, here’s the syllabus I came up with. I also created an online store with all the required reading (plus one very good book I couldn’t quite fit in to the 2,000-page limit, Dick Staub’s The Culturally Savvy Christian). Until I complete the “annotated bibliography” that will appear on this site later this summer under the more reading header, it’s a good guide to the books I consider essential reading—beyond (though including) Culture Making of course. :)

re: education, ministry, theology