The Wonder Report: April 10, 2026

Making Sense of the World

Apr 10, 2026

Happy Friday!

We are in the first few days of Eastertide, and I am grateful for a season of hope and renewal after the 40 penitential days of Lent. It’s good to be reminded of our death, to be open to the ways that sin rupture our lives and our relationships, and to find ways to train ourselves to say “no” a little more. We need to remember the Good Friday reality that “sorrow and love flow mingled down.” But mine is always one of the loudest “alleluias” on Easter Sunday morning, knowing we can once again turn our focus toward the light and life of resurrection.

Among the many things being renewed this week is The Wonder Report. I’ve taken almost a year hiatus while I vacillated strongly between totally packing up shop and jumping in feet first to go all out. As usual, I’ve landed here today somewhere in between. I won’t bore you with another litany of reasons why writing is different for me now. Instead, I’ll commit again to show up as I can, always trying to honor your commitment of time and attention with what I offer here.

At the same time, this issue of The Wonder Report does offer a small glimpse into why the call to write just won’t let me go. I’m beginning a three-part series today on culture creation, which seems like a beautiful way to work back toward some true thoughts about wonder as one of the purest reactions we can have as we try to make sense of the world.

I’m glad you’re here! Let’s get started!

Somebody’s Got to Do It

We sat in the hushed sanctuary of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church listening to Bach’s Concerto in C Minor and his Simeon cantatas on Candlemas Sunday. Thankfully, the program included an English translation from the German so that we could follow along with the baritone, tenor, and bass parts. The music undulated between Aria and Recitativio, Allegro and Adagio.

These old pieces of music echoing off the tall gilded ceilings felt made for this moment, a sound and message of joy and hopefulness in a world filled with pain, disappointment, and death.

“I look forward to my death;

Ah, had it already come about.

Then I will escape the distress

That [had] bound me yet in the world.”

“An incomprehensible light fills the entire circuit of the earth.

There resounds powerfully far and wide

A most desired word of promise:

Who believes shall be saved.”

Though I was seated in a pew with my husband and friends from church, I didn’t take for granted that the audience in general shared my beliefs or understood the significance of these musical masterpieces celebrating the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple, also known as Candlemas. It was, after all, a public concert. We don’t attend St. Paul’s ourselves. And the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra is a civic musical group, not a religious one. Yet here we were, listening to the work of one of the world’s greatest composers, who four centuries earlier set his attention on a little-known passage in the Gospel of Luke to create a piece of music that would be performed and enjoyed for centuries.

What compels a person to compose and create like that? Did Bach have any idea at the time that he was creating something with such longevity? Who chooses what will last … and what will not? And who is creating our culture today?

Could it be me? Could it be you?

I’d had this idea of culture creation on my mind for a couple of weeks by then. It started when I was driving to work one morning listening to NPR. Host Steve Inskeep was interviewing Kristen Stewart from the blockbuster vampire series, “Twilight,” fame. Stewart recently embarked on a new creative endeavor as writer and director of the film adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology Of Water.

During the interview, Inskeep cut to a clip from the movie. Just as I was navigating a narrow corner of the County Road I take to work, the one that usually requires my full attention, I heard Jim Belushi, playing Ken Kesey, author of the counterculture classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, say this: “I want you all to be winners. I want you to be warriors. Somebody has got to create our culture for the next 50 years and I want it to be you.”

I doubt I’ll see Chronology of Water or read the memoir, for reasons I won’t elaborate on here. Even so, that one line from the movie has stuck with me for weeks. It has consolidated my many thoughts about the tension of being a consumer and a creator. It has reminded me that our creative callings, talents, and interests have value beyond the personal – whether we realize it or not. It has nudged me to think about the cultural creators I am influenced by, as well as those that seem to be weak or missing. And it’s pushed me to ask myself this: Should it be me? Should I be one of those people who create culture for our time?

Of course, this provocative movie line has also prompted me to ask more rudimentary questions too, like what is culture? And what does it actually mean to be a culture creator?

In the context of the movie, the main character was taking a writing class, and the instructor, Ken Kesey, was pushing the students to write masterfully and transformatively. As a writer, this encouragement felt tailored made for me, especially as a writer in transition, who has struggled to pursue her craft after several major life changes.

But however this idea might have landed with me personally, especially in this one important area of my life as a writer, it found purchase in my imagination beyond that. Take you, for instance, dear reader. What if, like Ken Kesey, I said this to you: “Somebody has got to create our culture for the next 50 years and I want it to be you.”

How does that land with you?

For me, the word culture often implies capital “C” Culture, as in high culture, the arts, opera, ballet, and of course those Bach cantatas we listened to on Candlemas. “They are so cultured!” we might say about New Yorkers or Parisians. Or culture might also encapsulate the language, clothing, foods, holidays, and traditions of other people from other places, like many of the vibrant immigrant cultures we celebrate on Lunar New Year or Carnivale or Cinco de Mayo. I rarely think of my own family’s turns of speech, special recipes, or handed down skills as a culture.

But it all counts. High culture, pop culture, immigrant culture, minority culture, dominant culture, rural culture, counterculture, urban culture, work culture, subculture, or whatever kind of culture we find ourselves part of. It all counts. All of us are participants in a culture–often many overlapping cultures. And in the modern world, it’s easier than ever to participate in culture digitally and even privately as consumers of culture. We watch, we listen, we like, we share.

We do not have to be satisfied with being only culture consumers, however. We also have the ability to be culture creators, too. The digital world makes that easier than ever, of course. In the days leading up to this year’s Grammy awards, I heard several news pieces about the role of TikTok in creating new musical stars. But you don’t have to win a Grammy to have created culture on TikTok. Culture is not just what human beings make in the world. In fact, “culture is not just what human beings make of the world” either (emphasis mine). Culture “is in fact part of the world that every new human being has to make something of” (Crouch, p. 25).

As a point of distinction, Andy Crouch, in his book Culture Making, insists that we don’t actually ever make culture. “We make omelets. We tell stories. We build hospitals. We pass laws” (Crouch, p. 28). In other words, we create cultural artifacts or goods that, over time, evolve into our culture. And these contributions themselves are never created in vacuum. Rather, they are created out of and for the culture or cultures we are part of. At their heart, these artifacts and goods create culture by revealing how artists and writers and makers of all kinds see the world, what they make of it, how it moves us individually and corporately.

But my interest in culture making does not rest only with my work as a writer. As a librarian, I have a specific calling to be a curator and caretaker of culture. In my profession, we gather these artifacts and goods together in a place, both physical and digital. We expend great energy to reach as far and as deep as possible so that our collections represent the widest swath of our overlapping historical and contemporary cultures. Specifically as a public librarian, we want our collection to be an evolving picture of the interests, beliefs, and ideas of those in our community. When a person comes to the library, we want them to see themselves there.

Ironically, as we work to collect culture for a community, we too become culture creators, pairing resources in new ways, inviting our members to read and respond, even welcoming culture makers to use our resources to create culture themselves.

I don’t have any delusions that the culture I create now will be available 400 years from now to audiences around the world like Bach’s Concerto in C Minor. But I also have determined that that kind of longevity represents a poor measure for the importance of being a culture creator with whatever gifts, talents, and resources I have. The world needs making sense of now as much as ever. Those of us who are paying attention have a mantle to take up. “Somebody has got to create our culture for the next 50 years and I want it to be you.” And me. Let’s do it together.

I wonder … how do you define culture? What role(s) do you play in the various cultures you are part of? Consumer, critic, curator, collector, creator? What scares you or confuses you about our wider culture in this moment? How are you making sense of that?

Think about Culture Creation with me?

As I do a deep-dive into this idea of culture creation, I’m reading (and in some cases re-reading) several good books which have a lot to say about this topic. If you’d like to think through this topic for yourself or in conversation here at The Wonder Report, consider buying or borrowing some of these books:

Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies by Marilyn McEntyre. Eerdmans Publishing Company 2009.
Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life* by Makoto Fujimura. IVP Books 2017.
Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Expanded Edition)* by Andy Crouch. IVP Books 2023.

Enduring Culture: Bach’s Concerto for Oboe and Violin in C Minor BWV 1060R

Here is a beautiful rendition of the Back Concerto for Oboe and Violin in C Minor (BWV 1060R) that my friends and I enjoyed several weeks ago.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment over on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

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