Quotes about Culture

Who we are and when and where we exist affect how we imagine God.

I mean, if we try to explain Jesus's handling of his Bible in terms of how many Christians today feel the Bible "ought" to be read, Jesus will look like one of my college Bible students, playing free association with the Bible. Or worse, we may try to find some way of taking Jesus out of his ancient Jewish world and making him look more like a suburban Protestant, an urban hipster, a tea party spokesman, and so on.

The Creator is being reimagined all the time and can be reimagined through the lens of any culture, of any time and place. No one culture, and certainly not the (largely white male affluent) Western culture I inhabit, can claim superior status for reimagining God once and for all. The Creator doesn't need any of us to sit atop the mountain and speak down to everyone else.

There is no pure "theology" to be contrasted to "feminist theology" or "Black theology," because the supposed pure theology is driven by its own encultured concerns and assumptions.

The reputation Christianity has in the public arena has varied causes, to be sure, including our post-Christian culture, which has little use for religions of any sort. But ultimately some blame must fall squarely on the shoulders of Christian subcultures that are armed with an unwavering sense of certainty in what God wants here and now, which is not up for debate and must be imposed (to the glory of God).

We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

White privilege is not an overt act of racism but the simple observation that people of white skin are historically and culturally dominant, and therefore seen as the standard or norm.

the ancient Israelites were an ancient tribal people.

A God who does not connect to the world around us is a God who cannot speak to us. Believing in a God who demands that we continue to adopt only biblically ancient ways of thinking of God, which are themselves rooted in their own cultural moment, is to diminish God's active presence here and now.

We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.

America does not know the difference between money and sex. It treats sex like money because it treats sex as a medium of exchange, and it treats money like sex because it expects its money to get pregnant and reproduce.