Witness Within—Loving Culture into Conversion by Doug Tooke
To love a culture into conversion, as the great Cardinal George once nudged—with a twinkle, was it, or a wrinkle in the brow?—means one must open all the windows and let the flavor and funk and agony and zing of the place blow through, mess up your hair, put laughter in your lungs, and maybe even teach your heart a few new chords. Culture is not a battlefield strewn with threats, nor a museum cordoned off for safekeeping. It is the melody of a people at their most honest—it is the cracked cup, the stained-glass window, the bodysurf at dusk when the air is gold and the world seems, against all evidence, possible with mercy.
Consider the Incarnation, the wild and holy gamble—God pitching camp in our clutter, breathing our air, setting toes into our tangled dirt, God not as distant critic but as a child slurping soup, a son sneezing pollen, a man bleeding love in a city that did not want Him. What is this but the most stunning endorsement of inhabiting culture rather than fleeing it? To witness—as in, to see, to remain, to accompany—this is to say: nothing human is foreign to me, and every ache, every awkward dance, every poem is worthy of attention. Evangelization, then, is not launching arrows from the safety of a castle, but wandering the market, buying bread with friends and strangers, telling stories that shimmer with grace in every syllable.
History is brimming and sloshing with saints and artists who got this, who transformed the world by entering it, risking its confusions, shaking hands with its contradictions. Francis of Assisi, a troubadour with dust on his feet, could have spent his days railing against the excess and vanity of medieval fashion, but instead he cut his own path through the heart of his town, chanting the love of God in the language of birds and beggars. Dorothy Day sat in soup kitchens, living rooms, and courtrooms; she did not thunder from mountaintops, she whispered love in crannies and corners, writing columns and baking bread foolishly, persistently, as an act of holy proximity. Even Caravaggio—oh, his paint was bruised and real—illuminated the ordinary, rendering saints as human and laughable and bewildered, caked with the grime and glory of their times.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once mused that communities flourish not by circling wagons, but by storytelling, by living and sharing habits that reveal the architecture of the good; the sociologist Peter Berger remarked that every coffee shop and carpool lane is a chance for epiphany, a microcosm where the sacred flirts with the profane. To inhabit a culture is to learn its grammar, taste its soup, dwell in its noises, offering questions for its fears and candles for its dark nights. To reject a moment is to foreclose on mystery, but to inhabit it is to keep the door open for grace and surprise.
In media, this means not railing against the screech and babble, but offering stories that ring true—real pain, real hope, words thick with sorrow and joy. In education, it means teachers who love the wild hope of their students, who nourish curiosity and plant seeds even when they sprout sideways. Artists paint the sadness and hilarity of existence in neon and clay, refusing to withdraw, instead tugging beauty from the dumpster and the cathedral. In every community—be it the church basement, the city park, or the digital commons—the call is for more mingling, more listening, more neighborliness; it is the gentle, absurd courage of refusing despair.
What might a truly evangelizing love of culture look like today? It is a conspired joy, woven from truth and tenderness, a refusal to surrender to cynicism, nor to anesthetize oneself with criticism or nostalgia. It is to walk the city streets with open hands, to talk with the next-door agnostic about trout or Thérèse in the same breath, to bless without boasting, to reason with humor and humility, seeking unity without erasing difference. Christians do not illuminate the world by standing outside its door, wagging fingers; the light has always shone best from within—inside the stew of humanity, inside the unpredictable alleys of meaning, inside the daily labor of loving what is, and loving it into what could be.
Reference:
Catholic Review. (2025). Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonça urges Church to engage deeply with culture. Retrieved from Catholic Review archives.
