Andy Crouch on Technology, Work-Family Balance, and Home

Andy Crouch on Technology, Work-Family Balance, and Home

https://ifstudies.org/blog/life-in-the-third-oikos-a-conversation-with-andy-crouch

Publish Date: 2026-05-30 09:02:00

Source Domain: ifstudies.org

Andy Crouch has spent his life in three worlds—higher education, journalism and technology— without formal credentials. He studied classics at Cornell, got his Masters of Divinity at Boston University, spent a decade in campus ministry at Harvard and served as executive editor of Christianity Today. Now, he works at Praxis, a venture-building community rooted in what they call “redemptive entrepreneurship.” Along the way, he’s written some of the most influential Christian books on technology and family life of the past two decades: Culture Making, The Tech-Wise Family, and The Life We’re Looking For.

His wife, Catherine, is chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Swarthmore College. Their two children are grown, which makes Crouch the first subject in this series to speak from the other side of the child-rearing years. Andy paints a vision of the household broader than the nuclear family that begins before children arrive and matters long after they leave—a “formative environment to become human together.” 

Nicole: You’ve studied classics and divinity—and now you work on something called “redemptive entrepreneurship” at an organization called Praxis. That’s an unusual path. What’s the through-line?

Andy: I’m not sure one could say I’ve had a career. I’ve spent a lot of time in and around three worlds: higher education, Christian campus ministry, and journalism. But two things have been consistent.

The first is a deep love for technology. My father brought home a terminal from Syracuse University, where he was on faculty, when I was 10 or 11; it connected to the mainframe at 300 bits per second. I fell in love with programming. My dad started taking me out of school one day a week, dropping me off at the computer center where graduate students took me under their wing. Some of my first programs were submitted on punch cards. I’ve taught myself every generation of programming languages since.

The second is that in…

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