I just read this article by Roberta Green Ahmanson, who is on my short list of personal heroes (these images show me interviewing her in March at IAM's Encounter 10). In it, she describes two types of culture:

The sociologist James Davison Hunter has argued that—from entertainment, sports, and literature to family customs, fashion, and architecture—we live in an increasingly thin culture. I think of a film of ice on a lake so fragile that it breaks at the slightest touch. What can sustain us through suffering, loss, aging, and death? There is nothing to catch us when we fall. Thick culture is, instead, like the ice you see in a Dutch Master’s painting of canals in winter. Skaters fly across ice formed by freezing temperatures, adding first one layer, then another and another. Sliced, it would be feet deep. It won’t break when we fall.

A thick culture, in other words, provides a foundation for the challenges of our lives: for building friendships, marriages, and commitments, for facing loss, suffering, and even death.

When I read this article, I started thinking about the culture of my own life. I have some thin places, to be sure: an insatiable appetite for celebrity photos and gossip;  a propensity to neglect prayer and devotional meditation when things are going well in my life; a disregard of my conviction to only use my credit card for emergencies when there is a good sale at Target; a ready-defense of why I would rather stay home and do nothing on a Friday night, rather than go to my church's discipleship class; an addiction to caffeine.

But, thankfully, I also have thick places, and the more I think about it, that's where I spend the bulk of my time: regular phonecalls with my parents, where I tell them about everything in my life and invite their input; the time I spend preparing for leading worship, meditating on the songs' lyrics and praying for the members of my music team, pastor, congregants, etc; morning devotions (though sometimes they are, admittedly, rather "thin," they're always there - well, almost always); long walks with my dog in Snug Harbor; dinner with friends, where we talk just as easily about spiritual things as we do things like skincare and the latest PTA drama.

Interestingly, the more I think about it, both places provide food for reflection - the thin places are the cotton candy and the thick places are the rice and legumes. I don't want to live on cotton candy, but every so often...

In my city, there are marks of thin culture everywhere: right now, whenever I come upstairs from the subway at 42nd Street, I am greeted by a huge poster for the latest new program on Showtime, featuring a cluster of beautiful, nude lesbians, with a hint of airbrushed palm trees barely covering them "where it counts." That strikes me as pretty thin. A thriving sweat shop industry, rampant sexual promiscuity, systematic poverty oozing from the housing projects, and proud secular humanism are other marks of thin culture in my city.

And then there are the thick spaces: the many city-wide prayer and unity-in-the-church initiatives that have sprung up; the Museum of Biblica Art and International Arts Movement and Dillon Gallery; theater pieces like Max McLean's The Screwtape Letters and Threads/IAM's Babette's Feast; farmers' markets and artisan co-ops; used book shops; the Bowery Mission and God's Love We Deliver; outdoor cafes with reasonable prices; my church's summer camp for fifty urban at-risk kids. These are all, in varying degrees, thick places that provide "foundations for the challenges of life," as Roberta put it. 

So how about you? What are some marks of thin and thick culture in your sphere of life?

Your sphere could be the city in which you live, the family system in which you function, the social ecosystem in which you thrive (or fail to thrive). Whatever the case, would you call it thick? Or thin? Is your sphere a place where the challenges of life lead to growth or destruction? And what does that look like?