Interpreting Your World – Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture

"Equal parts innovative, surprising, and enlightening"Interpreting Your World equips readers to engage culture with greater fluency and fidelity in response to the triune God. It offers an approach that is attentive to the hunger for meaning, beauty, and justice and that is governed by the gospel virtues of faith, love, and hope."Justin Bailey's theology is a theology of flourishing, a theology that understands an artist's heart. His discourse enters into culture not just to engage it but to liberate it. This is a theology that is integrated and quite beautiful to behold. Interpreting Your World offers a lens for cultural goodness and for the sanctification of our imaginations; it is an invitation into new creation."--Makoto Fujimura, artist and author of Art and Faith: A Theology of Making"Bailey's treatment of faith and culture is penetrating, nuanced, and sane. Readers are in sure hands here."--Cornelius Plantinga, author of Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin"Bailey offers readers a profound gift. With clarity and skill, he introduces us to the dynamic ways theology and culture intersect. Rejecting simplistic and reductionistic Christian understandings, this book introduces us to the complex field of human action and divine grace that we call 'culture.'"--Matthew Kaemingk, Richard John Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life, Fuller Theological Seminary"Bailey's fresh approach to widening the framework for Christian dialogue with culture comes as a creative reimagining of a topic that is sometimes oversimplified. This book provides an accessible path for navigating the broad contours of the theology-culture conversation and diversifies our ways of understanding and imagining Christian life in the world today."--Jennifer Allen Craft, Point University, West Point, Georgia"Equal parts innovative, surprising, and enlightening, this book sings. It should be required reading for any person of faith who is asking how to engage culture in more robust and life-giving ways--which is to say, everyone should read this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough."--Kutter Callaway, Fuller Theological Seminary; coauthor of Theology for Psychology and Counseling