Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues
Overview
How should Christians approach important contemporary issues like war, race, creation care, gender, and politics?
Christians in every culture are confronted with social trends and moral questions that can be difficult to navigate. But, the Bible often doesn’t speak directly to such issues. Even when it does, it can be confusing to know how best to apply the biblical teaching.
In Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues authors Joshua D. Chatraw and Karen Swallow Prior first offer a broadly accessible framework for cultural engagement and then explore specific hot topics in current Western culture including:
- Sexuality
- Gender Roles
- Human Life and Reproduction Technology
- Immigration and Race
- Creation and Creature Care
- Politics
- Work
- Arts
- War, Weapons, and Capital Punishment
Featuring contributions from over forty top thinkers, proponents of various views on the specific topics present their approaches in their own words, providing readers an opportunity to fairly consider options.
Unique in how it addresses both big-picture questions about cultural engagement and pressing current issues, Cultural Engagement provides a thorough and broad introduction useful for students, professors, pastors, college ministers, and any believer wanting to more effectively exercise their faith in the public square.
- Provides a foundation for understanding culture
- Surveys how different Christian traditions have understood cultural engagement
- Offers a side by side comparison of competing approaches
- Defining Culture: How It Cultivates and Communicates
- Understanding Christian Approaches to Cultural Engagement: Why the Categories Help and Hurt
- The Centrality of the Gospel in Cultural Engagement
- The Importance of Virtue and Skill in the Practice of Cultural Engagement
- Engaging on Homosexuality
- Engaging on Gender
- Engaging on War and Weapons
- Engaging on Reproductive Technology
- Engaging on Race
- Engaging on Islam
- Engaging on Creation and Creature Care
- Engaging on Politics
- Engaging on Work
- Engaging on the Arts
Part 1 - Charting a Course for Cultural Engagement
Part 2 – Practicing Cultural Engagement
Top Highlights
“Engaging culture, rightly conceived, includes studying the world around us—to understand its aspirations, longings, institutions, artifacts, ideas, and issues—in order to better engage the people within cultures.” (Page 22)
“Third, culture consists of the social and physical dimensions of life, such as the institutions, symbols, customs, and practices that function as carriers of both the (1) formal ideas and (2) precognitive assumptions about life.” (Page 26)
“who lack the resources to provide adequate care; of couples who want to become parents but can’t conceive” (Pages 144–145)
“The egalitarian view proposes that leadership roles within the home and church ‘are determined by gifting rather than by gender.’” (Pages 101–102)
“we are all swimming in this thing called ‘culture’” (Page 21)
Josh Chatraw and Karen Swallow Prior, along with a host of friends, model for all of us what it means to think Christianly about the intersection of the gospel and culture, doing so with courage and conviction while encouraging careful listening, Christlike kindness, and civility. Cultural Engagement will form, inform, and motivate readers not only to engage thoughtfully but to live and serve faithfully. This compelling and comprehensive volume should become an essential resource for students, pastors, and thought leaders alike. Highly recommended!
—David S. Dockery, president, Trinity International University and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Christians talk a lot about cultural engagement, but our dismal record in recent decades suggests that our engagement strategies need a lot of work. In this provocative and timely book, Joshua Chatraw and Karen Swallow Prior have convened a wide-ranging cast of authors to debate the most pressing issues facing the church today.
—Thomas S. Kidd, James Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History, Baylor University
Not only do we Christians lack ready-made answers to some of the pressing issues in our present day cultural life, but most of us are still trying to get clear about the questions. For this we need biblical discernment informed by cultural savvy. Thank the Lord, Karen Swallow Prior and Josh Chatraw have all of that in abundance!
—Richard J. Mouw, president emeritus and professor of faith and public life, Fuller Theological Seminary
- Title: Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues
- Editors: Joshua Chatraw and Karen Swallow Prior
- Publisher: Zondervan
- Publication Date: 2019
- Pages: 368
- Resource Type: Collected Essays
- Topic: Christainity and Culture
Joshua Chatraw Joshua Chatraw (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) serves as the director for New City Fellows and the Resident Theologian at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. His books include Apologetics at the Cross, Cultural Engagement, Truth in a Culture of Doubt, and Truth Matters. He is a fellow with the Center for Pastor Theologians and has served in both pastoral and academic posts during his ministry.
Karen Swallow Prior (PhD, SUNY Buffalo) is an award-winning professor of English at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me and Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More--Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist. Prior has written for Christianity Today, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Think Christian, and The Gospel Coalition. She is a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, a senior fellow with Liberty University’s Center for Apologetics and Cultural Engagement, a senior fellow with the Trinity Forum, and a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States.
Reviews
1 rating
Bill Vaughan
2/25/2022
Remember that book called the Bible? Well...the authors (this is a multi-author work - chapter by chapter) forgot to build / base their arguments in the Bible. Usually, a weak book with be full of proof-texts. This one rarely had even a proof-text. It's impossible to use a book like this in a Christian context where "It is written" (e.g. Matthew 4) is not the basis for the arguments and conclusions.