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.

The Christian Vision Project begins each year with a big question. In 2006, we asked, How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?

We knew from the start that any set of articles, no matter how compelling, would provide an inadequate answer. Every how eventually has to be lived out by a who. Making sense of our moment in history, in other words, requires us to make a wise choice of heroes. Fortunately, over the course of 2006, we found one.

Infuze Magazine is an online journal of Christians and cultural creativity. Their editor Matt Conner interviewed me by email, showing tremendous patience in waiting for my replies, over the past year. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about culture-making and the church.

I’ve read an article of yours in which you discuss the idea of differing generations pushing for key influencers in culture in differing areas. The older generation pushes for Christians in political leadership to influence culture, while the younger tends to push for influencers in entertainment. Can you describe this further? Is there a problem with this?

Let’s remember that forty years ago, white evangelical Christians were largely disengaged from culture in general. [And from now on, when I say “Christians,” I’m going to be talking about white evangelical Protestants. Little of what we’re saying here will be true of Catholics, mainline Protestants, or black Christians.] They had a strong, not to say rigid, dichotomy between the sacred and the secular, between the church and the world. Both in rhetoric and reality, Christians simply didn’t connect their faith, conceived largely as saving souls for heaven, with any kind of cultural activity.

Nathan Bierma and the staff of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship lured me into a pleasant conference room a few months ago, set a recorder in front of me, asked some interesting questions, and caught me saying some alternately perceptive and foolish things about worship, power, technology, commercialism, cell phones, tall blond people, organic food, singing, and my favorite church in North America.

Not long ago I attended a strategy session for the culture war.

Participants examined the decline of marriage, the cheapening and flattening of human sexuality into contextless pleasure, the exploitation and destruction of unborn human beings. Speeches were given. Brows were furrowed. Resolutions were made.

War, I was reminded, does terrible things to the warriors.

As the “tech editor” for NBC’s Today Show, Corey Greenberg spends most of his on-air time shilling for the latest technological gadgets. (Literally, shilling—last April the Wall Street Journal revealed that several technology companies had paid him handsomely for his promotional efforts.) He can tell you why you need a video iPod, what you’re missing without satellite radio, and where to put the fifty-inch flat screen TV. But on January 29, 2005, he was enthusiastically undermining half a century’s worth of high technology.

In the Today Show studio, Greenberg lathered up his face with English shaving cream and a badger brush, whipped out a vintage double-edge razor, and made a passionate case that the multi-billion-dollar shaving industry has been deceiving its customers ever since 1971, when Gillette (no small advertiser on network television) introduced the twin-blade razor. Everything you need for a fantastically close and comfortable shave, Greenberg said, was perfected by the early 20th century.

When I tell my grandchildren about America at the turn of the century, I will tell them about houses and wars.

I will tell them about houses in places like Wheaton, Illinois, a one-time center of mild, middle-class, Midwestern evangelical Christianity, where grand teardown mansions loom where bungalows once stood. I will tell them about the heady days of option ARMS, cash-out refinancing, and homebuilders whose stock prices made the front page.

I will tell them about our wars, fought with blustering confidence and dubious competence, ambitious and precarious, like a teardown on a tiny lot.

Then I will tell them two of Jesus’ most misinterpreted parables.

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Thanks for your interest in my work and writing!

—Andy Crouch