Now, How Shall We Be? This Cultural Moment and Our Christian Response

Badley and Ross show how to practise and offer hope, meaning and belonging rooted in the resurrection of Christ.

By Ken Badley and Amanda Ross

Tyndale Academic Press, 2020.

198 pages. $25 (e-book $20)

this book aims at Christians looking for ways to offer hope, meaning and belonging in this cultural moment. The authors do well exploring how practising hospitality, wonder, gratitude and wisdom contribute to Christian faithfulness.

They struggle, however, with divisive matters – politics, economics, justice and creation care – partly because they draw on American-sourced examples for a Canadian audience.

Co-author Ken Badley lived and taught for some years at George Fox University in Oregon and now teaches at Tyndale University in Toronto. He is joined by Amanda Ross, an MDiv student at Ambrose University in Calgary.

How the book describes the uniqueness of our present moment is also problematic. For example, the opening page says, “Our culture has slipped from its old moorings” and the new moorings have become “frayed at the edges in recent decades.”

To what extent can we say our culture dominated by European heritage has been moored by Christian moral consensus? How many people find the old moorings attractive given that whatever concordance was achieved was often accompanied by horrendous violence and great injustice?

Despite my misgivings, many readers will be helped by this book. Badley and Ross show how to practise and offer hope, meaning and belonging rooted in the resurrection of Christ. This is always the right Christian response to the present age, regardless of how the current cultural moment came to be.