About Engaging Culture
My name is Logan Mauldin. I am currently a Masters student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. We recently moved here from Florida. I work nights at the UPS airport hub and my wife, Teresa, is a preschool teacher for the Christian Academy of Louisville. We actively serve in a great church in the South End called, Parkwood Baptist Church. It has quickly grown to be a second home for our family. God has blessed us with three beautiful children, Benjamin, Zoë, and Joseph
I enjoy reading (theology, philosophy, and history mostly), working on computers, and learning about anything making up culture. When I use the word “culture” I mean non-Christian media, trends, and insights. This includes movies, music, television, science, philosophy, technology, etc.
What do I mean by engagement? It is an approach to culture that is neither secularist nor sectarian. It is neither uncritical nor hypercritical, not thoughtless participation in or blanket withdraw from culture. Instead, it is my hope that we will be convinced, inspired and equipped to critically and winsomely engage culture by recognizing and celebrating what is good, redeeming and renewing what is broken, critiquing what is gray, and rejecting what is bad.
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Be careful that you don’t fail to recognize that “culture” is not something “out there” relative to Christian faith. There’s plenty of culture “in here.”
Sincerely,
The former owner of the domain name http://www.engagingculture.com
Hey Matt,
Glad to see you found me. That’s kind of the point of the site. When I say culture, I mean the sum of all of our activities, entertainment, and acts of creativity. I want people to see that “culture” and all that it entails isn’t necessarily bad. I believe that culture is something inherent in human nature. Whenever people gather for certain purposes culture is created and exhibited. So I agree that while there are many forms of ’secular’ culture, there is also plenty of ‘church’ culture.
I’m not sure if I understand the ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ thing. You make it sound like all the Christians are hiding in a bomb shelter. When in reality we’re never called to retreat from the world. True, we are being sanctified, therefore we can’t be conformed to the world. We are called to permeate it without being permeated by it. Is this a hard balance to maintain? You betcha. Does it sometimes get messy? Yep!
But I think the minute we forget that ‘the world’ consists of sinners just like us in need of the grace we have received, we turn it into an Us vs. Them match where no one wins. We need to stop trying to ‘Christianize’ secular culture. That’s not what Engaging Culture is about. It means that Christians realize that we are designed by a creative God and part of reflecting his image is being creative ourselves. We need to get busy creating some true culture of our own.
Sorry, sometimes I just keep rambling. Matt, I’m just glad to have a commenter. If you’d ever like to post some thoughts, your former domain name is open to share them. Or, if you’d like to get back into the blogosphere, I’d be more than happy to design you a new website. Web-design is my day job. God bless.
Logan,
Nice website. Started browsing it after you started commenting at the Connect website. I’d like to take more time to read some of your thoughts so I don’t have a comment for now, but I just wanted to encourage you to say that I like the way that you express yourself, and even when some have disagreed with you, you seem to have responded thoughtfully and respectfully. I’ll comment more later.