24 August 2011—Steve Jobs officially resigned as CEO of Apple today, a move anticipated in January when he took a medical leave of absence. I wrote this piece back in January reflecting on the prospect of a day like today—though I have to say I did not expect how moved I would be by his simple letter of resignation. I offer this meditation on Steve Jobs’s significance, and limitations, not just as cultural criticism but as a prayer for him and all those who love him, and I hope my gratitude for his cultural creativity comes through as well.

Steve Jobs’s medical leave of absence is the top story in today’s newspapers. The Wall Street Journal says his brief and poignant memo raises “uncertainty over his health and the future of the world’s most valuable technology company.” These two questions—Jobs’s health and Apple’s health—are the focus of almost all the coverage today.

But I’m interested in the health of our culture, and what will happen to it when (not if) Steve Jobs departs the stage for the last time.

As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress.

In the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology. In October 2001, with the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month where unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—and technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.

The center of moral authority is shifting in Western culture. In the 20th century it shifted from clergy to psychiatrists, from Jonathan Edwards’s followers to Freud’s. Now the ground is shifting again, to neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and behavioral economists: the high priests of the brain. Try browsing any major news site without encountering a story about how our brains are primed for insider trading, serial monogamy, or Chipotle burritos.

These stories reflect real and remarkable progress. We understand more of the brain’s biochemistry, the neurotransmitters and synapses that make it the most complex system known in the universe. Researchers have designed ever more clever experiments that tease out the complexities of human behavior. (Did you know that men who have just walked across a rickety bridge find a young woman more attractive than do men who have just been sitting on a bench?) The results have reaffirmed what the wise have always known: We know very little about ourselves—the habits and hunches that shape our choices before we know we are choosing. But can neuroscience offer insight into not just the way we are, but the way we ought to be?

To judge by The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (Random House), David Brooks thinks so. Like Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and Brooks’s other forays into what he calls “comic sociology,” this book is funny, frequently wise, and almost always spot on in its set pieces on the ways of cosmopolitan elites. But none of his past books were so packed with illuminating summaries of otherwise obscure and technical scientific findings, and none addressed so explicitly science’s implications for “human flourishing”—a wonderful and resonant phrase that deserves wider attention.

Ten years is a very short time. As I reflect on the world in 2011 compared to the world in 2001, I’m less struck by how much has changed than by how much is the same. Terror, war, new technology, economic boom and bust, surprising political triumphs followed by sudden changes of fortune—yup, sounds like the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, and 1960s to me. It’s almost axiomatic that any change big enough to shape an entire nation or society happens in long waves spanning generations, not a mere ten years.

Indeed, when I reflect on the most significant developments of the never-adequately-named 2000s (the aughts? the aughties? the naughties?), it seems that almost all of them were well under way in 1999, or even 1989. At the same time, in the last ten years some long-wave trends accelerated in notable ways. Acceleration matters. In one sense, walking, riding a horse, driving a car, and traveling by plane are simply variations on the millennia-old human theme of mobility, tracing back literally to the earliest signs of our restless race. But the difference between five miles an hour and 500 miles an hour is not just a quantitative matter of speed, but a qualitative change in the horizons of possibility.

Here are ten significant trends in North American culture that accelerated dramatically in the 2000s—almost always for better and for worse at the same time.

One | Connection

By far the most significant acceleration was in our technologies of connection. In June 2000, 97 million mobile phone subscribers existed in the United States; in June 2010, the number rose to 293 million. Urban and suburban Americans swim in a sea of WiFi (sitting in my living room on a quiet side street I can see 8 wireless networks)—and in the middle of Nebraska, you can get online at McDonald’s.

What did not take off in the 2000s was “virtual reality”—a world constructed entirely of disembodied bits, populated by avatars and existing only in the realm of the ideal. As the 2000s ended, the virtual-reality world Second Life was on virtual life support.

Instead, we used technology to reinforce our embodied relationships. Facebook was the highest trafficked website in 2010 (US subscribers in 2000: zero; in 2010: 116 million). Look at your Facebook friends—unless you are a celebrity, the vast majority of them are people you have met in the flesh. Same with the recents on your cell phone. Rather than replacing embodied connection, our devices supplemented and extended it, an electromagnetic nervous system to match the physical infrastructure of transport built in the twentieth century.

Near the end of his masterful book To Change the World, we discover that James Davison Hunter does not believe we should (or can) change the world. Nor should we be ” ‘redeeming the culture,’ ‘advancing the kingdom,’ ‘building the kingdom,’ ‘transforming the world,’ ‘reclaiming the culture,’ [or] ‘reforming the culture.’” It’s a surprising turn, given that a casual reader might naturally think, for the first hundred pages, that To Change the World is about how to change the world. And therein, as they used to say, lies a tale worth telling.

It is a tale of three “essays” originating in a talk that Hunter gave a number of years ago, also called “To Change the World,” which has circulated widely among leaders in the evangelical movement. The substance of that talk, with its analysis sharpened and extended, forms the first of Hunter’s three essays in To Change the World, and it maps fairly neatly onto the “irony” signaled in his subtitle.

The irony is that there is no phrase more beloved to a certain kind of Christian than “to change the world.” But in Hunter’s persuasive account, the strategies those very same Christians have pursued are, by themselves, woefully incapable of changing the world. (Hunter’s greatest interest is clearly Christianity’s theologically conservative varieties, though he attends to mainline and progressive Christianity as well.) One group focuses on personal renewal and national revival, while another—championing a “Christian worldview”—locates the necessary condition for cultural change not so much in the heart as in the mind. Either way, the premise is that once the hearts and minds of ordinary people are properly revived and informed, the culture will change. “This account,” Hunter says flatly, “is almost wholly mistaken.”

One of the best things that ever happened to me was getting pneumonia when I was 22 years old. It was the last in a series of minor calamities that hit me that first year out of college, alone and adrift in a Boston winter. I found myself flat on my back for the better part of two weeks, slowly recovering.

Sometime during those two weeks, something I had known for a long time became palpably, personally true: I was going to die. Not of pneumonia at age 22—there was never any real fear of that. But someday, I suddenly understood, I would lie down for the last time and never again get up. I understood it—which is to say, I stood under that reality, was grasped by it, accepted it. And without a lot else to do in my small apartment, I pondered it.

Death, whenever it came, would come too soon. Between now and that moment, what did I want my life to be?

I pondered the question of memory. It struck me that just a few decades after my death, the only people likely to remember me with any clarity at all would be a handful of family members. It was, and still is, exceedingly improbable that my life would be memorable enough for anyone else to take lasting notice. And then I strained to remember the names of my grandparents’ parents—and realized that very soon indeed, even to my own descendants, I would be a hazy and ultimately forgotten ghost from a past as distant to them as the nineteenth century was to me.

There was only one thing I was really sure would last after even those closest to me had forgotten me and passed into their own forgottenness. “Seek first the kingdom of God,” Jesus had said. I was, and still am, as sure as I could be (which is to say, just barely sure enough) that the kingdom of God had come and would never pass away, would indeed hold everything else in reality. But what did it mean, concretely, to seek the kingdom? What could I do differently with whatever life I was granted once the pneumonia was gone?

Sometime in high school, I acquired the idea that attending a rock concert, for a middle-class kid anyway, was a transgressive act. It was a step out of the sedate norms of suburban life into an exhilarating, dangerous netherworld, an intoxicating haze of smoke, primal rhythms, and throbbing sensuality—throwing off the shackles of predictable conformity and throwing down the gauntlet of rebellion.

Well, earlier this week I joined 60,000 Midwesterners at U2’s 360 Tour concert at Chicago’s Soldier Field, and can report, with faint disappointment, that the most transgressive act I managed to commit, or indeed witnessed all evening, was talking with some friends in the narrow stairway of section 443 before the concert began, thus impeding the path and incurring the wrath of the vendors of Miller Lite. (“ONE CAN LIMIT,” their coolers proclaimed.)

The concertgoers streamed into the Chicago Bears’ home stadium in attire that can best be described as Apple Store Clientele—casual cool with an extra helping of organic sustainability. Befitting U2’s long and protean career, they were strikingly intergenerational. Four teenage boys wearing school T-shirts from the Near North Side, cleancut and fresh-faced, stood right in front of me, singing every word through the whole show. A couple rows down, two late-40s parents escorted their teenage daughter and preteen son. Or was it the other way around? I saw lots of parents accompanying pre-driving-age teenagers, making me wonder whether the parents or the children had been the ones to make the case for going to see U2. Perhaps the predominant demographic, at least in the nosebleed seats, was twentysomething couples, few of whom betrayed the nervous electricity of first dates: my bet is they were either married or contentedly cohabitating. All in all, it was a perfectly domestic evening.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett reiterated his best-known investing principle in the New York Times last week: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.” It’s a vivid way of saying that the best investors are, to borrow a phrase from macroeconomics, counter-cyclical. Their investing sentiments are set by simply observing the prevailing mood in the marketplace, and doing the opposite.

Something like this maxim applies to the work of any Christian who wants to discern the times and speak truthfully about our culture. Reinhold Niebuhr famously said he wanted his preaching to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable”—strangely akin to Buffett’s guideline. The whole record of the Hebrew prophets is counter-cyclical, seen most vividly in the transition from Isaiah 1–39 to Isaiah 40–66. The first half of the canonical book contains searing denunciations of a complacent, compromised people at the height of their comfort. The second half, its sights trained on a decimated population in exile, begins, “Comfort my people.” And Isaiah has his own version of Buffett-style counter-cyclicality: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low.”

Well, our culture is pretty afflicted right now. Which is why I am more hopeful than I’ve been in a long time.

The Blue Ridge Parkway winds along the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, skirting Asheville and Roanoke above the hidden hollows and little towns. And on Thursday afternoon, thanks to Bayerische Motoren Werke, three friends and I were driving along the parkway, scattering wild turkeys left and right, carving turns and going flat out on the straightaways in a BMW 335Ci convertible. It seems that BMW periodically turns up at upscale resorts to let the (presumably free-spending) guests try the company’s cars for free, for no obligation beyond the painful duty of returning it at the end of the drive. We were attending a conference at a such a location, already stretching the limits of our decidedly middle-class budgets, at just the right time. After filling out a surprisingly informal questionnaire, the keys were ours and we were off.

As we gasped and laughed at the difference between our borrowed joyride and our real-life cars (as the owner of a base-model 2000 VW Passat, I have the most fly car of the bunch), we were well aware of several layers of irony. Down in the valley motorists were waiting in long lines for scarce gasoline at the stations that were open at all, due the supply crunch in the Southeast following Hurricane Ike. We, meanwhile, were burning gas like it was going out of style (which, come to think of it, it soon may). Then there was the improbable identity of the four merry riders: all of us activists in the growing environmental movement within evangelical Christianity, concerned not least with the reality of and remedies for human-induced climate change. That climate change is caused in part, of course, by the carbon dioxide that we were gleefully generating every time the Beemer let out a particularly gratifying growl. Let’s just say there was a hint of guilt in the pleasure.

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.

A friend of mine likes to quote G. K. Chesterton, who said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” I’ve just published a book called Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (which may or may not illustrate Chesterton’s axiom). So you might think that I’m eager for Christians—and any member of our society who cares about its preservation and renewal—to get out there and make something, anything, rather than simply marinating in the consumption and critique that so often are our default postures in the world.

And indeed there’s something to that. The best and most important things most of us will do with our lives—friendship, marriage, and parenthood, not to mention cooking, gardening, singing, and praying—will probably not be the things we do best, especially at first. They are worth doing badly, especially if the alternative is not daring to do them at all.

But what if we want to recover our creative calling and do it better than badly? What are the ingredients of the lasting excellence that can lead to the creation of cultural goods that have a widespread influence?

Here are five thoughts.

There’s a running joke in Washington, D.C., that the most-read section of a political memoir is its index, where the powerful turn first to find out how they, their friends, and their opponents are portrayed. Michael Lindsay’s impressive survey of evangelical “movement leaders” and “public leaders” is likely to prompt plenty of index-surfing in the coming months, for no one has covered the amazing variety of evangelical Christians in American culture with such depth and breadth.

What would you say to 1500 students at a Christian college, sitting in their biweekly required chapel service, as the guest speaker at the beginning of “Alcohol Awareness Week”? Here’s what I said—after two Scripture readings from Genesis 9 (Noah’s episode of drunkenness a few narrative moments after getting off the Ark) and John 2 (Jesus’ first sign at the wedding at Cana). As with all talks, it falls short of my standards for writing, but it still seems worth sharing. Cheers.

I have this feeling that I’ve been given a nearly impossible speaking assignment. Shane Claiborne was here on Tuesday, and I’m just not nearly as interesting as Shane. Shane lives in radical community in one of Philadelphia’s grittiest neighborhoods; I live in a cozy little suburb of Philadelphia with two kids in a lovely single-family home. I do not have nor have I ever had dreadlocks. I do not have a cool East Tennessee accent. And I do not make my own clothes. We may all be in for a boring time. Plus I’m here as part of Alcohol Awareness Week, and surely there is nothing so truly deadly as a speaker you’ve never met trying to make you “aware” of “alcohol.”

The only things I have going for me—the only things we have going for us—are these two crazy stories from the pages of Scripture. Two stories that give us two very different pictures of what alcohol means for people who want to be biblical people, who want to follow this story all the way to its surprise ending.

As our family sits together, eyes closed, we say grace. Today it’s Timothy’s turn. “God, thank you so much for all we have,” he begins in what turns into a typically prolix nine-year-old’s prayer. Eventually he is done—“in Jesus’ name, Amen”—and I turn the key. We have just filled up our car with gasoline.

There is just one reason we are saying grace at the gas station: a few months ago I read J. Matthew Sleeth’s book Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action, which very sensibly suggests that if Christians bless God for food, we also ought to bless him for fossil fuels. Those of us who say grace at restaurants know the discomfort one feels bringing a visible expression of religious gratitude into a public place. I can testify that it’s stranger still in a gas station, where one becomes aware just how unprayerful the act of pumping gas normally is. Unlike a well-prepared meal, gasoline does not prompt gratitude unbidden. The stuff is smelly, dangerous, and not at all self-evidently good in itself. It is a means to my ends, juice for a momentary sense of power and control. It is surprisingly hard to remember to stop and say thanks before I pull out, a little too quickly, into traffic.

Early in my college career, the distinguished literary critic Wayne Booth paid a visit to a class in which I had managed to wangle a seat. The text of the week was Booth’s Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, an attempt to rescue reasoned discourse from the clutches of corrosive modern skepticism. Asked a question about a point on one particular page, Booth borrowed the teaching assistant’s copy to check the exact wording. He looked up in surprise, a slight smile on his face, and said, “I see that the owner of this book has written in the margin, ‘Bullshit.’”

As the graduate student in question turned bright red and the rest of us laughed out loud, I noticed that Booth seemed strangely satisfied. Someone was paying attention, even if they didn’t exactly respond with “the rhetoric of assent.”

I can only hope that Roger Gottlieb is half as indulgent as the late Dr. Booth should he ever come across my copy of his book A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future. While I believe the marginalia are free of scatology, they do betray a fair amount of frustration. There are few causes in which I would more hope a writer to succeed, and there are few books that strike me as more likely to injure the cause, at least among one pivotal constituency: the evangelical Christians who, if books like Gottlieb’s can be kept from doing too much damage, may yet become the decisive constituency for environmental stewardship in the 21st century.

The online magazine StudentSoul interviewed me recently about cultural creativity, why we can’t settle for cultural critique, and how college students can prepare for a life of creating culture.

What does “culture-making” mean and how might it go hand in hand with or differ from “cultural transformation”?

Cultural transformation is something that a lot of Christians talk about and aspire to. We want to be a part of transforming the culture. The question is, how is culture transformed? Does it happen just because we think more about culture, or because we pay more attention to culture? As I was thinking about cultural transformation I became convinced that culture changes when people actually make more and better culture. If we want to transform culture, what we actually have to do is to get into the midst of the human cultural project and create some new cultural goods that reshape the way people imagine and experience their world. So culture-making answers the “how” question rather than just “what” we are about. We seek the transformation of every culture but how we do it is by actually making culture.

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Thanks for your interest in my work and writing!

—Andy Crouch