the Culture Project unveiled

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 04, 2010

After much thought and careful planning, we've launched our Culture Project. Please take a look.

Browse through the background material (if you haven't already read it), and then plunge into the main topic for discussion on the Introductory Project: a short but challenging essay by Solzhenitsyn.

Our hope is that our regular readers will join in the Culture Project, and eventually bring their friends and neighbors into the campaign as well. Toward that end, each new Project will include a PDF file of questions for discussion, which you could print out and distribute to your acquaintances. You might want to distribute copies to members of an existing book club, Bible-study group, or parish; pastors might even consider inserting the questions in a parish bulletin. Or you might decide to start up a new group just for the Culture Project. 

We're issuing a challenge. How you respond to that challenge is entirely up to you. There's no set formula for the Culture Project: no established procedures, no rules of engagement, no membership charters. We hope to find, encourage, and support active Catholics, and set them loose to transform our culture. The Catholic Culture site will derive no particular benefit from a successful campaign, aside from the satisfaction of seeing a new burst of effective Catholic activism. In an important sense it's not "our" campaign at all. But we will keep issuing the challenges, and supplying the supportive material, for all those who take part. 

We're planning for a long, gradual campaign: a marathon, not a 100-meter dash. (To understand the scope of our ambitious plans, again, see the background material for our Introductory Project.) It's an enormous task that we confront; we can't expect instant results. But we have to start somewhere, and sometime, and with someone. Why not here and now? Why not you and me?

Whether you can do a little or a lot, there's a role for everyone. Please join us.