I have this feeling that I’ve been given a nearly impossible speaking assignment. Shane Claiborne was here on Tuesday, and I’m just not nearly as interesting as Shane. Shane lives in radical community in one of Philadelphia’s grittiest neighborhoods; I live in a cozy little suburb of Philadelphia with two kids in a lovely single-family home. I do not have nor have I ever had dreadlocks. I do not have a cool East Tennessee accent. And I do not make my own clothes. We may all be in for a boring time. Plus I’m here as part of Alcohol Awareness Week, and surely there is nothing so truly deadly as a speaker you’ve never met trying to make you “aware” of “alcohol.”

The only things I have going for me—the only things we have going for us—are these two crazy stories from the pages of Scripture. Two stories that give us two very different pictures of what alcohol means for people who want to be biblical people, who want to follow this story all the way to its surprise ending.

There is just one reason we are saying grace at the gas station: a few months ago I read J. Matthew Sleeth’s book Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action, which very sensibly suggests that if Christians bless God for food, we also ought to bless him for fossil fuels. Those of us who say grace at restaurants know the discomfort one feels bringing a visible expression of religious gratitude into a public place. I can testify that it’s stranger still in a gas station, where one becomes aware just how unprayerful the act of pumping gas normally is. Unlike a well-prepared meal, gasoline does not prompt gratitude unbidden. The stuff is smelly, dangerous, and not at all self-evidently good in itself. It is a means to my ends, juice for a momentary sense of power and control. It is surprisingly hard to remember to stop and say thanks before I pull out, a little too quickly, into traffic.

As the graduate student in question turned bright red and the rest of us laughed out loud, I noticed that Booth seemed strangely satisfied. Someone was paying attention, even if they didn’t exactly respond with “the rhetoric of assent.”

I can only hope that Roger Gottlieb is half as indulgent as the late Dr. Booth should he ever come across my copy of his book A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future. While I believe the marginalia are free of scatology, they do betray a fair amount of frustration. There are few causes in which I would more hope a writer to succeed, and there are few books that strike me as more likely to injure the cause, at least among one pivotal constituency: the evangelical Christians who, if books like Gottlieb’s can be kept from doing too much damage, may yet become the decisive constituency for environmental stewardship in the 21st century.

What does “culture-making” mean and how might it go hand in hand with or differ from “cultural transformation”?

Cultural transformation is something that a lot of Christians talk about and aspire to. We want to be a part of transforming the culture. The question is, how is culture transformed? Does it happen just because we think more about culture, or because we pay more attention to culture? As I was thinking about cultural transformation I became convinced that culture changes when people actually make more and better culture. If we want to transform culture, what we actually have to do is to get into the midst of the human cultural project and create some new cultural goods that reshape the way people imagine and experience their world. So culture-making answers the “how” question rather than just “what” we are about. We seek the transformation of every culture but how we do it is by actually making culture.

We knew from the start that any set of articles, no matter how compelling, would provide an inadequate answer. Every how eventually has to be lived out by a who. Making sense of our moment in history, in other words, requires us to make a wise choice of heroes. Fortunately, over the course of 2006, we found one.

I’ve read an article of yours in which you discuss the idea of differing generations pushing for key influencers in culture in differing areas. The older generation pushes for Christians in political leadership to influence culture, while the younger tends to push for influencers in entertainment. Can you describe this further? Is there a problem with this?

Let’s remember that forty years ago, white evangelical Christians were largely disengaged from culture in general. [And from now on, when I say “Christians,” I’m going to be talking about white evangelical Protestants. Little of what we’re saying here will be true of Catholics, mainline Protestants, or black Christians.] They had a strong, not to say rigid, dichotomy between the sacred and the secular, between the church and the world. Both in rhetoric and reality, Christians simply didn’t connect their faith, conceived largely as saving souls for heaven, with any kind of cultural activity.

Participants examined the decline of marriage, the cheapening and flattening of human sexuality into contextless pleasure, the exploitation and destruction of unborn human beings. Speeches were given. Brows were furrowed. Resolutions were made.

War, I was reminded, does terrible things to the warriors.

In the Today Show studio, Greenberg lathered up his face with English shaving cream and a badger brush, whipped out a vintage double-edge razor, and made a passionate case that the multi-billion-dollar shaving industry has been deceiving its customers ever since 1971, when Gillette (no small advertiser on network television) introduced the twin-blade razor. Everything you need for a fantastically close and comfortable shave, Greenberg said, was perfected by the early 20th century.