Faith and Culture, Listening and Learning

I’m convinced that one of the reasons the church has been culturally inert is because we don’t have a lot of laymen who are interested in the whole big ecosystem of culture and all its interrelated aspects. Culture is the way our humanity in all of its forms and expressions is lived out, so understanding culture is necessarily interdisciplinary. You can’t do it in a piecemeal way.

That quote is from an interview entitled, The Well-Informed Generalist: Why We Should Listen to Ken Myers. I have listened to Ken Myers through Mars Hill Audio for at least 15 years, off and on, when a pastor in my first church turned me on to him and his audio interviews, kind of a prolonged NPR-type of interview from a Christian perspective, if you have ever listened to them.

Myers, in his book All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christianity and Popular Culture, helped me to understand in written form how Christians can and should understand and interact with culture, instead of either adopting it whole-hog on one extreme, or throwing culture out with the bath water at the other extreme.  Read how their website describes Mars Hill Audio:

MARS HILL AUDIO is committed to assisting Christians who desire to move from thoughtless consumption of contemporary culture to a vantage point of thoughtful engagement. We believe that fulfilling the commands to love God and neighbor requires that we pay careful attention to the neighborhood: that is, every sphere of human life where God is either glorified or despised, where neighbors are either edified or undermined.

Suffice it to say, I agree wholeheartedly with the title of this interview, we should listen to Ken Myers as a thoughtful and astute assessor of culture from a Christian perspective. He has interviewed guests from the author Mortimer Adler to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and Jens Zimmerman, and every letter inbetween.

I encourage you to go to their website, and download a sample audio journal or choose from a variety of bonus interviews that are free. I think you will be challenged and hooked. You will hear from a variety of guests on different topics that you have never heard discussed before from a Christian perspective.