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Culture making at even the largest scale happens in these small concentric circles. Any given person can only participate in a few sets of circles, but there are some spots that only you can fill. This frees us from having to concern ourselves only about a handful of powerful people who allegedly get to shape culture. It is true that some people get to green-light Hollywood movies. I don't get to do that. Probably most of our readers don't get to do that. But there are many things I can do that those people cannot do that make a cultural difference.

One of our neighbors cultivates and creates things in our local school that, if President Bush came to visit our school, he couldn't do. He could make a splash for a day. He might help push through a law that affects our school. But on a day-to-day basis, our neighbor has a greater ability to shape what life is like for a bunch of children, teachers, and staff than the President of the United States or the head of the Department of Education. To me that's very freeing. I may be concerned about other things, but I'm not responsible for anything but the small concentric circles where God has placed me.

And "family is culture at its smallest and most powerful." Might this be a good word for people who read your book's title and say, "Culture making … oh, I'm not artistic, I'm not a creative type. What's my place in this?"?

Yes. When I started writing the book I was working with Ivy League students. So I was initially thinking I needed to write a book for people who are culturally creative. But this emphasis on family emerged as vitally important. It's not that we should focus on one to the exclusion of the other, because we're called to be in all spheres and scales of culture.

But the further along I went the more I appreciated the importance of the local and the small. It was very important to me that those who may not be paid to do any culture making—maybe someone at home with their kids or homeschooling—would realize they are doing significant cultural creating. Emphasis on the family has sometimes signaled a retreat from culture, but there are ways to make the life of your family a culturally creative enterprise.

You remind us that as a culture maker even the Word was constrained—and freed—by the limits and particularities of the culture in which he was made flesh.

Yes, incarnation means embracing the constraints of a particular place, a particular people, and it is radically good news that the salvation of the whole world could begin that small. The Incarnation greatly challenges the assumptions of power, technology, and scale. When God chose to intervene in the world, he thought it best to start was in a pre-technological, modestly literate, backwater of the Roman Empire. And it's the best because the revolution God was introducing to the world was designed precisely to undermine Babel's idea that humans will scale up, and through homogeneity and technology, we'd take over.

The Babel story's not about love. Love is always small. So a cultural transformation that is going to eventually reseed the whole world with the fruits of love is going to have to start in a particular place and time with just ordinary people. And yet that doesn't take anything away from its capacity to become a world changing movement, which it did and is and ultimately will fully be.

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September 2008, Vol. 52, No. 9