missio

As Christians, we’re in the business of redeeming and creating culture for the glory of Christ and the advance of His Kingdom. In order to redeem culture, and bring out the truth in it, we have to understand where it is prior to our intervention and reclamation. We are to be monitors of culture. We have to keep tabs of what is going on in the cultural and social environment around us so that we are informed to the point of being able to redeem that environment. From art to music to literature to film to family structure and overall belief systems, we have to keep ourselves informed and knowledgable about what is going on around us. So how do we do that?

Here are some resources that I use (and some I should) to dissect the general culture in America:

Magazines

• Paste
• Relevant
• Rolling Stone
• Wired
• Fast Company
• UTNE Reader

Books

• The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
• The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
• Anything and everything by Malcolm Gladwell

Websites

• Digg
• Various news sites (CNN, MSNBC, BBC)
• del.icio.us popular
• YouTube
• Amazon (especially the bestsellers list and what people are buying)
• Wikipedia

By far the most valuable resource would be the magazines: they give the most diverse range of cultural influence on a regular basis (usually monthly). Books may be obsolete by the time you’ve read them (not those I mentioned, but some others more than likely), and websites are usually geared for a specific audience. Digg is becoming a little more diverse, but not much. YouTube is diverse, but it’s hard to extract cultural nuggets from a collection of videos. If I had to pick three resources to stick with, it’d be Wired magazine, Paste magazine, and the Digg website. Hope these resources help you a little dissect the general culture in which we live.

Any I missed, any suggestions, or any recommendations that you yourself use?