Ken Myers cares about culture. That stewardship, that intention to be concerned about and think about and nurture healthy cultural forms differs from those who merely want to manipulate culture as way to aggrandize their empires. Ken Myers caring about culture helps me to care about culture and resist some of the folly of our time. I hope to resist more.
I highly recommend that you subscribe to the Mars Hill Audio Magazine. Ken Myer's audio essays are challenging and beautiful, and his interviews with leading thinkers, writers, musicians, educators, etc. are worth far more than he charges. I don't know of another resource like this. Stephanie and I listen to past editions of the audio magazine repeatedly, even as we listen to the current ones.
Lastly, check out this interview with Ken Myers in ByFaith Online. You'll get a taste Ken and his mind and heart for the Church and for the world. It's a wonderful piece.
Excerpt:
Q. Yet Christians often defend certain cultural resources and practices based on the logic that if God is using them, they must be good.
Well, I don’t think everything that happens is evidence of common grace. I have a high view of the common curse, too. The fact that God can use something doesn’t make it intrinsically valuable. God uses us all the time, and we know how flawed we are. God used Judas to accomplish His purposes. God used Balaam’s ass. So cultural criticism should not be about whether something is potentially useable by God, because of course everything is useable by God. The question is whether the thing is inherently problematic.
Because evangelism drives so much of Christian cultural engagement right now, I think Christian critics are nervous about saying anything critical. Whereas secular critics, they’re not worried about being winsome. I’ve seen that skittishness increase remarkably in the last 30 years, and I think it’s a function of the fact that as our culture gets more post-Christian, the church is just going to look more and more out of sync. I think a lot of Christians are afraid that if we look like we’re too critical of things, then people aren’t going to be attracted to us. The worst thing that can happen to an evangelical scholar is to be mistaken for a fundamentalist.
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