I’ve been concerned by the resurgence of the r-word in our culture. I’ve felt anxiety over political policies and news stories, and I’ve dug into data about our culture’s epidemic of loneliness. It’s easy to worry or complain about our culture, but my friend Andy Crouch has challenged me over the years to consider this truth:

“We’ve been very good at complaining about culture. We’ve been very good at consuming culture—and being conformed to culture by consuming it—but we haven’t been very good at cultivating it and creating it.”

From making an omelette to organizing a presentation to planting seeds to sending an email—we spend most of our days making or sustaining some aspect of human culture, although we don’t often think of it that way. How can we be thoughtful and careful as we seek to create, change, and cultivate culture?

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Andy joined me on the podcast to examine some important questions about culture making:

• What does the recent rise of the r-word tell us about our culture?
• How does language, both careless and careful, shape our world?
• What is the connection between social status and the words we choose?
• How does technology influence our understanding of culture and control?

I hope you’ll listen to (or watch) our full conversation.

Show Up With Care

I loved how Andy returned again and again to the importance of showing up with care in our culture—in our words and in our actions:

1. Careful language makes a difference—and it takes courage.

Language shapes culture, but not just through the meaning of words. Andy says, “Maybe the deepest level of how language shapes culture—is there care behind it? And by care, I mean both kindness, but also attention.” Care makes all the difference.

Andy points out,

“It takes courage to continue to use words carefully when you see language being corrupted and used to damage and used to convey contempt. It’s so much easier to damage things than to repair them. And it’s so much easier to create an environment of coarseness and destructiveness than it is to build beauty in the midst of that.”

But our commission is to

“go on using words carefully when everyone around you is using them like bombs.”

2. Careless words often stem from the pursuit of status and belonging.

Andy explains that when someone feels insecure, it’s tempting to use harmful language, such as the r-word, to put others down and elevate one’s own social status. “We are living in a time of incredible insecurity where people just don’t feel like they have enough power. And so you’ve got to trot out the diminishing, degrading rhetoric to establish that you, and people like you, count.”

3. Show up with care in relationships.

Whether it’s attending—paying attention with kindness—to an elderly parent or a teenage child or a neighbor or even ourselves, we have opportunities within our days to participate in relationships of love and the work of love in the world. As we show up with care, we resist technology’s attempts to commodify relationships. Every month, Andy makes a long trip to sit with his mom, who has dementia. He points out that being present with care in those moments “produces nothing. I’m not in control of anything that matters most. And it’s probably the most important thing I do… to be there.”

4. Show up with care in our work and creativity.

Andy acknowledges that “the space in which one can create worthwhile things has greatly diminished in our world in certain ways.” There’s no guarantee that thoughtful, careful, creative work will be valued or protected in our current culture. “But,” he says, “it’s still what we have to do… And so you do that thing well and faithfully.”

After you listen, I hope you’ll share this conversation. And I’d love to hear from you. How have you found ways to show up with care?

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