Dear Culture Shapers Here Are Your Options: Mapping Out Christian Responses to Culture By Paul McClure | Illustration by Carmen Bright
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58 | CONVERGE. sep - oct
hanks to Netflix, I am a documentary addict. It all started when I watched Big River Man, a documentary about an overweight alcoholic Slovenian man who swims the Amazon. Yes, the same river with anacondas and piranhas. He swims that. A little while later I watched Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was about the notoriously secretive graffiti artist Banksy and an eccentric filmmaker-turnedartist named Mr. Brainwash. Then just the other day I watched a fascinating documentary called The Queen of Versailles, a story about an excessively rich, dysfunctional family and their quest to build the largest home in North America. (It’s about the size of a small airport, in case you were wondering.) Reflecting on my near obsession with these bizarre stories, I started to wonder: what do all these documentaries have in common? Besides showcasing oddball visionaries and their wacky antics, they all show there’s something fundamentally creative about the human species. All of us — whether we’re resilient swimmers, graffiti artists, or pageant queens — want to make something of our world. We want to shape culture. 2013