Something exciting is happening at the intersection of Christianity and culture. Christians are becoming dissatisfied with the postures they adopted toward culture in the twentieth century: condemning it, critiquing it, copying it, or just consuming it. More and more, we want to be people who cultivate: people who tend and keep what is good. And we want to be people who create: adding new cultural goods that move the horizons of the possible in places as wide as the world and as small as a home.
This site was active from 2008 to 2012. While we posted original material from time to time, we mostly wanted to point our visitors toward surprising, hopeful, and challenging glimpses of culture making in action. We did our best to avoid the sacred–secular dichotomy that has dogged so much Christian thinking about culture. If it was enlightening and provocative, we'd post it, whether it was "Christian" or not.
The one major sphere of culture we didn't cover very much was politics. (If Andy could only pick one political site to send you to, it would be the consistently thought-provoking Center for Public Justice.) This site focuses on all the aspects of culture that are "upstream" from politics—because we can only hope for healthy politics when other spheres and scales of culture are being cultivated well.
Andy is a writer, editor, producer, and dad. In his day job he is executive editor at Christianity Today. He is the author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling and Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power. One of the smartest things he ever did while editor-in-chief of re:generation quarterly was to hire a young editor named Nate Barksdale. You can find out more at andy.crouch-com.
Nate has known, learned form, and worked with Andy in various capacities for more than fourteen years. He brings an insatiable curiosity, a very long reading list, and a love of convergence, connection, and cross-cultural coincidence (not to mention the letter C) to his curatorial work for culture-making.com. In the past he's edited theology and travel guides, taken buses and trains all the way from Cape Town to Kampala, written a not-so-great honors thesis about the history of Swahili dictionaries, and circumnavigated the Sea of Galilee on a bicycle. He lives near his extended family at the edge of Portland, Oregon.
Christy is a performing artist and worship leader, among other things. She learned how to pluck a chicken in Nigeria, scaled a small section of the Great Wall of China, and volunteered at an orphanage in El Salvador on several occasions. She has acted on a soap opera and done Shakespeare, but now she devotes much of her time to International Arts Movement, where she loves doing weekly interviews with interesting people like Billy Collins, Susan Isaacs, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Fascinated by different cultures, Christy is always up for an overseas or cross-town adventure, but she also loves being at home with her pets, coffee pot and many shelves of books.
Nathan is a documentary filmmaker and new father. While his daughter is his new subject of choice, he has also focused his lens on a variety of topics including backyard wrestling, the prosperity gospel, hog wrassling, short term missions and gang members imprisoned in Guatemala. In addition to running his own production company, Fourth Line Films, Nathan has collaborated with Andy on three projects, Where Faith and Culture Meet, Round Trip Missions, and the Global Conversation. But life is not just about documentary films. Nathan is also a perpetual chewer of straws (it relieves the stress) and is on a quest to find the perfect meatball.