The Life We're Looking For
Description
'A fascinating and eye-opening book' - Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind
Our greatest need is to be recognised - to be seen, loved, and embedded in rich relationships with the people around us. But for the last century, we've displaced that need with the ease of technology. We've dreamed of power that doesn't require relationship (what the premodern world called magic) and abundance that doesn't require dependence (what Jesus called Mammon). Yet even before a pandemic disrupted that quest, we felt threatened and strangely out of place: lonely, anxious, bored amid endless options, oddly disconnected amid infinite connections.
In The Life We're Looking For, bestselling author and cultural critic Andy Crouch reveals how we traded lives of rich relationship for a world of impersonal power - and how each of us can fight back. From the generosity of early Christians to the efforts of entrepreneurs working to create more humane technology, Crouch shows how we can restore true community and put people first in a world dominated by money, power and devices.
There is a way out of our impersonal world, into a world where knowing and being known is the heartbeat of our days, our households, and our economies. Where our human vulnerabilities are seen not as something to be escaped but the actual key to our becoming who were made to be together. Where technology serves us rather than masters us - and helps us become more human, not less.
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Andy is partner for theology and culture at Praxis, which works as a creative engine for redemptive entrepreneurship. His two most recent books - 2017's The Tech-Wise Family and 2016's - build on the compelling vision of faith, culture, and the image of God laid out in his previous books, Playing God and Culture Making.
Andy serves on the governing boards of Fuller Theological Seminary and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. For more than ten years he was an editor and producer at Christianity Today, including serving as executive editor from 2012 to 2016. He served the John Templeton Foundation in 2017 as senior strategist for communication. His work and writing have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time and several editions of Best Christian Writing and Best Spiritual Writing - and, most importantly, received a shout-out in Lecrae's 2014 single.
From 1998 to 2003, Andy was the editor-in-chief of re:generation quarterly, a magazine for an emerging generation of culturally creative Christians. For ten years he was a campus minister with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Harvard University. He studied classics at Cornell University and received an M.Div. summa cum laude from Boston University School of Theology. A classically trained musician who draws on pop, folk, rock, jazz, and gospel, he has led musical worship for congregations of 5 to 20,000. He lives with his family in Pennsylvania.
