Christianity vs Culture

“A vibe shift is underway…. It’s easy to get excited about some of the cultural shifts. But it’s important to appreciate how far we’ve strayed from anything resembling traditional faith or values. It’ll take a vast shift to reverse these decades-old trends, which now have deep roots in contemporary culture.” - TGC

“Os Guinness calls this a ‘civilizational moment,’ where society isn’t just at a critical crossroads in twenty-first century America. It’s instead at a critical crossroads for Western civilization itself.” - Breakpoint

“The claims… are usually a mix of legitimate critique and odd straw manning. Some argue that the German rationalist history of worldview makes it wrong…. Others suggest that it reduces authentic faith to something too cerebral…Perhaps the most common critique is that it just doesn’t ‘work’ in today’s cultural environment.” - Breakpoint

“there is one key contribution that Christians alone can make to politics: prayer. While I’ll grant that people of any faith can pray and perhaps even do pray for the political process, only Christians can pray and be heard.” - Challies

“According to Barna, 84% of Americans believe the ‘highest goal of life is to enjoy it as much as possible,’ 86% believe that to be fulfilled requires you to ‘pursue the things you desire most,’ while 91% affirm that ‘the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself.’” - Breakpoint

“for most of us, it can be difficult to feel like our work matters to God. How can we know that our work is bringing glory to God when it doesn’t seem all that special?” - IFWE

A review of Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church. “…there’s no consensus on how Christians ought to engage the culture….Each option has strengths, but many of them seem to draw more from contemporary cultural assumptions than from centuries of Christian experience.” - TGC

“They are now discovering what has always been true, that the Western ideas of human rights, political equality, and science and art are products of Christianity. These things do not occur in most civilizations, and there is no reason to expect that they will endure in the West if Christianity fades.” - Breakpoint

“Many of his readers will feel stretched by the high strangeness of the stories he tells as well as the spiritual medicine he prescribes. But in my view, time has largely vindicated the central theses of his last two books, and this ought to earn him a more generous—which is not to say uncritical—reading.” - Mere Orthodoxy

“In a culture of death, nothing can satisfy us. The things of our world have become exclusively means… of our self-directed projects of building and securing worth, goodness, and meaning—and thus are no longer meaningful, good, worthy ends in themselves.” - Desiring God