A thought-provoking collection of recent Christian writing
Just what does it mean, practically speaking, to be in the world but not of it?
What is it about huge corporations that "make us feel like we're making a bargain with Mephisto for our soul?"
How can we stay close to God even when assailed by "gaudy excesses" of the "commercial Christian pop culture scene"?
These and many similar questions are lucidly answered in The Best Christian Writing 2004, a collection of essays (including one sermon), profiles, and interviews drawn from magazines and journals published in 2002–3 and reprinted in book form by Jossey-Bass, Inc., San Francisco. This is the fourth volume in a series.
An eight-page introduction by Yale Divinity School professor Miroslav Volf in which he attempts to define Christian writing is, I feel, as good as any of the essays that follow. He reiterates the ancient wisdom that the soul of Christian writing is "the ability to know everything through Christ; take that away and you will lose its content, motivation, and style."
To nurture the soul of Christian writing, says Volf, you must extricate yourself from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
"Every Christian writer," he continues, "should have a 'tower,' a space slightly above the world, or, if one prefers to think in temporal terms, a time to pursue noncontemporaneity."
Some of the writers will be familiar to Sentinel readers. They include poet and author Kathleen Norris (profiled in the Sentinel dated August 9, 1999), who writes here about the dangers of letting a simple diversion like reading become an obsession—restless instead of restful, with despair replacing the simple joy you once found in it. Among her solutions is to laugh at herself. "Laughter," she say, "is the one thing that despair cannot tolerate."
Lauren Winner (Sentinel, August 11, 2003) is represented by an excerpt from her book Girl Meets God, in which she describes her efforts to speak in tongues. She eventually learns that she cannot test God in this way, and ought not to ask for a prayer language until she can ask without making the issue of tongues the test of her entire faith.
Philip Jenkins (Sentinel, August 4, 2003), a professor at Pennsylvania State University, writes about the demographic changes in the United States that have contributed to a "New Religious America." He points to projections suggesting that by mid-centuary, 100 million Americans will claim Latino origin, mainly to the benefit of Christian churches. "Quite unconsciously," he notes, "the United States has long since committed itself to an immigration policy that will inexorably make the country a far more solidly Christian nation than would have been dreamed of in the 1960s."
Some who glance at The Best Christian Writing 2004 may find they have read the original articles in such magazines as The Christian Centuary, Christianity Today, and Sojourners, and yet will welcome the opportunity to revisit them in this compact, paperback form.
The writers represent diverse communities within the Christian faith—Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—and their contributions range from the scholarly to the lighthearted (and from 3 to 16 pages in length). We are swept from Nairobi in Kenya to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and from Oxford University in England to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, where we hear from William Phillips, who was a joint-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997.
Even with his intense passion for research, it's encouraging to find Phillips keeping a wider perspective. "The truths that are in the Bible," he says, "are far deeper truths than the kind of truths that I read in a physics textbook.... Scripture doesn't tell us about the wave nature of particles; scripture tells us about really deep things."
And Phillips is not the only writer in this book who sheds fresh light on the relationship between science and Christianity—a connection, as the Sentinel confirms, that can lead to spiritual healing and regeneration.
