Reading

I have been reading again, and some good ones are "Invisible Girls" by Sarah Thebarge and "Hands Free Mama" by Rachel Macy Stafford. Not that I am a mama, or haven't told you there is a bun in the oven (there isn't), but I want to be more intentional. the "xoxo before you go" is something I want to do with all my loved ones before they leave...the "looking in their eyes" as they talk to you...I need to get this into my life before the mama part.
Just finished "Culture Making" by Andy Crouch. I didn't agree with all of it, but much of it was quotable.
“The essence of childhood is innocence. The essence of youth is awareness. The essence of adulthood is responsibility.”
“Culture is what we make of the world. It is the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else. We make sense of the world by making something of the world.”
“We don’t make culture, we make omelets. We tell stories. We build hospitals. These specific products of cultivating and creating are what we call “artifacts,” or “goods,” are eventually, over time, become part of the framework of the world for future generations. “
“To diagnose culture, we can look at these and say 1. What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world is? 2. What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world should be? 3. What does this cultural artifact make possible? 4. What does this cultural artifact make impossible (or at least very difficult)? 5. What new forms of culture are created in response to this artifact?”
Family is culture at its smallest—and most powerful.
“When someone goes to another culture in pursuit of economic or political opportunities, we’ve traditionally called them “Immigrants;” when they do so in pursuit of evangelistic or religious opportunities, we’ve called them “missionaries.” But as the wheels within wheels overlap more and more in a mobile world, most of us have some choice about which cultures we will call our own. We are almost all immigrants now, and more of us than we may realize are missionaries too.”
“A worldview comprises a cultures answer to four crucial questions: who are we? Where are we? What’s wrong? What’s the remedy? Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in worldviews is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. Culture is not changed simply by thinking, the only way to change culture is to create more of it. Creativity is the only viable source of change. “
“Cultural power is the ability to successfully propose a new cultural good/artifact. Where have we successfully proposed a new cultural good/artifact?  Where are the cultural contexts where our cultivation and creativity bears fruit? With whom am I sharing my power? How am I making it possible for others to cultivate and create culture?”