Chi Alpha @ Stanford

I just fin­ished a fas­ci­nat­ing col­lec­tion of essays com­piled by Os Gui­ness called The Great Exper­i­ment: Faith and Free­dom in Amer­ica. The “Great Exper­i­ment” of the title is Amer­ica itself: a nation with­out prece­dent in its treat­ment of faith.

It made me think deeply. It avoids either of the extreme posi­tions often taken by con­tem­po­rary authors (that the found­ing fathers barely tol­er­ated reli­gion or that they were all Bible-thumping fun­da­men­tal­ists) in favor of a more intel­li­gent view.

The the­sis through­out the book is that faith and free­dom in Amer­ica are code­pen­dent: indi­vid­ual faith requires free­dom, free­dom requires pub­lic moral­ity, pub­lic moral­ity requires wide­spread indi­vid­ual faith.

The found­ing fathers (the major­ity of whom were thought­ful Chris­tians) seemed to think that sep­a­rat­ing the church from the state was a pro­foundly bib­li­cal idea: I have to say that the mes­sage I’ve always taken from 1 Tim­o­thy 2.1–2 is that we need to pray for our rulers to leave us alone (faith-wise). In other words, it seems that sep­a­ra­tion of church and state was God’s idea.

Inter­est­ingly, I was fin­ish­ing this book I came across an arti­cle in Books & Cul­ture about recent schol­ar­ship on this very theme (schol­ar­ship which I ref­er­enced in an ear­lier post­ing)! The arti­cle is titled Why Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State Is Still A Good Idea: Even If It May Not Be What the Founders Had In Mind. I found the arti­cle middling-to-fair, but that’s prob­a­bly because I’d just come from read­ing Guiness.

If you’re curi­ous about the role of reli­gion in America’s pub­lic life, I encour­age you to pick up this book and read through it. You might also want to check out the ear­lier post­ing on an inter­view with Charles Tay­lor about What It Means To Be Sec­u­lar.

I ran across this at Tolle, Blogge: you can get some free stuff to read!

The blog­ger who men­tioned this site espe­cially rec­om­mends The Inter­col­le­giate Review.

I just ran across Antithe­sis, a site that pur­ports to be “a voice from the emerg­ing Chris­t­ian counterculture.”

That’s over­stat­ing the case a bit: there is a real (evan­gel­i­cal) Chris­t­ian coun­ter­cul­ture and these guys ain’t it.

Still, their site is worth­while. Their basic premise is that North Amer­i­can Chris­tian­ity has so iden­ti­fied with our soci­ety that we can­not stand against it, for that would be to destroy our­selves. There­fore, they have decided to be a voice for true ref­or­ma­tion and a call to thought­ful reflec­tion on what it means to be a devoted appren­tice of Jesus.

This site is com­ing from a Reformed tra­di­tion (def­i­n­i­tion: that sort of means they per­ceive them­selves to be fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of John Calvin). The rea­son I men­tion that is that I don’t agree with all their the­ol­ogy (and actu­ally have some seri­ous points of con­tention with them), but I still think their fam­ily of sites is worth check­ing out.

There are zil­lions of Chris­t­ian books out there, and many of them are worth­while reads. There are few, how­ever, that are truly out­stand­ing. Here are some that really need to appear on your read­ing list!

Grow­ing Spir­i­tu­ally:
1) The Spirit of the Dis­ci­plines, by Dal­las Willard (author, Ama­zon)
2) Prayer, by Richard Fos­ter (Ama­zon)
3) Life Together, by Diet­rich Bon­ho­ef­fer (Ama­zon)

Under­stand­ing the Bible:
1) The Chal­lenge of Jesus, by N.T. Wright (pub­lisher, Ama­zon)
2) Slaves, Women, and Homo­sex­u­als, by William Webb (pub­lisher, Ama­zon)
3) Sur­prised By The Power of the Spirit, by Jack Deere (author, Ama­zon)

Rea­son­able Answers to Hon­est Ques­tions
1) Mere Chris­tian­ity, by C. S. Lewis (author, Ama­zon)
2) Long Jour­ney Home, by Os Guin­ness (Ama­zon)