It is perhaps unsurprising that much of my thinking and reading during my time at the Academy has concerned the notion of place—specifically, how relationships develop within the contours of shared places and how those places affect who we are and how we live. I began thinking seriously about place after hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit my state in the fall of 2005, as I was starting my senior year of college. The damage was a local and inescapable concern for residents of south Louisiana. After the storms, we couldn’t just change the channel or click a new link to escape the story. Even if the rest of the world moved on, we still had a devastated region and a dysfunctional major city to tend to. 

Growing up, I thought New Orleans was just a smelly, crime-ridden, bizarre place. And while it is all of those things, after Katrina it also appeared beautiful and vulnerable. Louisiana’s problems have been well documented, but the storms helped me appreciate how blessed I have been by my home state. Here was a place that had not only given rise to jazz and jambalaya in the French Quarter but had sustained the Otts, the Joneses, and the Brittons in Livingston Parish—generations of my ancestors who had planted themselves in one place and worked hard to make it better. Aware of all this, I decided to leave.

I wasn’t tired of Louisiana, but I needed an opportunity to think critically about my future plans. The Academy was a chance to experience a new place and to gain perspective on my life, so almost two years to the day after Katrina, I arrived on Maryland’s Eastern Shore for nine months of reflection and study. I left the community I had known my whole life for a new kind of community—one consisting of eleven strangers with whom I would share a place that was new to all of us.

Moving to a new place meant learning to adjust to its responsibilities: in this case, it meant attending matins, reading for class, working in the lodge, and learning to love the people around me. As I settled into the patterns of life here, I was tempted to see them as tedious and repetitive. But patterns and daily responsibilities are inescapable, and I’m learning to see them as opportunities for sustained faithfulness to this community. It is the small acts of daily life—every meal cooked, every prayer prayed, every toilet scrubbed—that work like so many little bricks to build something bigger: a community, a place, a home. This is as true for me here as it was for the generations before me in Louisiana.

The apostle Paul wrote that our citizenship is in heaven. We are indeed wayfarers and strangers. Yet we sojourners make our homes somewhere on earth, even in our transient society. And I have been given a special gift: I am truly “from” somewhere. I wonder if that means I have a unique responsibility to Louisiana. Fixing a broken state government, transforming the economy, and restoring New Orleans are huge tasks that will require the sustained faithfulness of generations of people. But as a Christian, how can I despair of hard, incremental work? Can I not trust that even in Louisiana, in spite of the state’s struggles, God is working out his mysterious redemptive plan?

I long to be back in the place I’ve always called home, but I suspect my journey is just beginning. In the years ahead, I may pursue jobs and a graduate degree in places outside of Louisiana. I wonder whether I’ll feel at home in those places. The truth is, I may not feel at home even if I return to Louisiana, but I can’t imagine a better place to plant myself. There is a lifetime of good work to be done there, and I love the state and its people. While it is not my eternal home, it is a place suffused with brokenness and hope, a place yearning for redemption and fulfillment—much like this native son who hears the faint call of jazz music everywhere he goes.

For more than half a century the views of one neuroscientist/philosopher, the late Professor Donald MacKay, had a major influence on debates about mind and brain and soul and body. Donald MacKay’s views continue to influence discussions not only amongst philosophers of mind and brain, but also amongst philosophical theologians. This widespread influence calls for as clear a statement of the views that Donald MacKay had on a series of important issues at the interfaces of science and faith. This book provides it. David Norman has performed an invaluable service to scientists, philosophers, theologians and all those who take their Christian faith seriously. 

Dealing as MacKay often did with complex issues, and even given his remarkable ability to expound his ideas clearly, it remains the case that it has been, and still is, all too easy to misrepresent what Donald MacKay was really saying. David Norman sets Donald MacKay’s thinking in the context of his personal background and beliefs and of his activities as a scientist and leading apologist for the continuing relevance of Christian faith.

This book traces out, from MacKay’s many published works, the way his thinking began, was presented and developed on topics such as complementarity, logical relativity, and individual eschatology and just what he meant by describing himself as a Comprehensive Realist.

As David Norman spells out the story, he highlights the pitfalls that even some distinguished thinkers have fallen into in interpreting some of Donald MacKay’s many writings. How do we know the difference between a set of contradictory statements and a set of complementary statements? What is the relationship between brain stories and mind stories? What exactly do we mean by logical relativity and logical complementarity? And how are answers to these questions relevant to widespread debates about individual responsibility and individual eschatology? And he reminds us never to forget Donald MacKay’s insistence upon the need at all times for ‘Semantic hygiene’ and, as a Christian, a constant recognition of our radical dependence on the sustaining power of our Creator. And he asks whether some of Donald MacKay’s views changed towards the end of his life as he reflected further on topics such as re-embodiment and resurrection.

All of the issues listed above are elegantly expounded and sympathetically dealt with by David Norman and we are all greatly in his debt for doing so. My comments on this book are not as a disinterested academic. I met Donald MacKay towards the end of the Second World War and the late 1940s onwards our mutual scientific interests and issues at the interface of science and our shared Christian faith led to frequent meetings and a deep enduring friendship developed. He was my best man at our wedding and I was with him a few days before he died. I, like all those who knew him, will continue to give thanks for his life and his penetrating thinking. As someone who was thus privileged to know Donald MacKay as a friend, colleague, and co-author, for more than 50 years, I am delighted now to welcome and hope for the widest possible circulation of this timely book. 

Racism and division between Albanians and Serbians has a long history. During Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, Albanians lost many of their civil rights. They were not allowed to have more than an 8^th-grade education, were forced to obey curfews, and were subjected to anti-Albanian rhetoric. The situation peaked in 1999, when thousands of Kosovar Albanians were killed by Serbians and forced from their homes. NATO intervention brought the fighting to a halt, and UN peacekeeping forces now occupy Kosova.

The leadership workshop where we taught was sponsored by the Qiriazi Institute, an NGO in Kosova created after the war in 1999 to foster Kosovar leadership training and development. Kosova, currently a UN protectorate whose people are anxious for independence, was governed by Serbs prior to the war. Because of its recent history, and because the average age of the population is twenty-five, Kosova has a great need for capable leaders. As we reflect on our experiences and relationships with the students there, two themes emerge: the radical nature of servant leadership and the power of forgiveness.

Another Kind of Leadership

One of the immediate challenges we faced was in presenting the love and service of Christ in a culture with an ethnic identity strongly tied to Islam and a widespread distrust of Christianity. The workshop was designed to expose college students to leadership characterized by integrity, moral vision and service to others. Though not explicitly Christian, the leadership concepts that we taught were all based on the character of Christ and the love and service seen in His life through the Gospels. Seminars on topics such as vision, integrity, listening, and valuing people encouraged students to give their gifts and abilities to something greater than themselves.

In light of the recent conflict, it was not surprising that the students struggled with the seminar on valuing people. Many asked, “What if people do not value us?” This presented a great opportunity to teach them that servant leaders lead without expecting anything in return. We explained that servant leaders value others not because of what they get out of it, but because all people are fearfully and wonderfully made. Communicating to students that other people do not have to earn or merit love was a powerful contrast to their day-to-day experiences. For instance, Albanian culture often does not value women in the same way as men. A female student described her status in her family by saying that her father cares nothing for her; he only cares about her brothers. She said with hurt and bitterness, “My father, he leaves me nothing.” Many female students expressed similar concerns. Other students remarked that they were eager to value everyone—except Serbs. At those moments we were reminded that without the transforming power of Jesus Christ, true change was impossible.

Another Kind of Forgiveness

Liridon, one of the students, invited us to his family’s house for dinner one evening. His father told us that before and during the war with the Serbs, he spent time in prison and was severely abused. Liridon related how his family escaped harm by hiding in trash bags on the back of a cart heading out of Kosova. Another student was forced to watch as his parents were tied to a haystack and burned to death. Most of Peja, our home base while we were there, was destroyed during the war by Serb forces, and the city is only slowly recovering. These and many other students’ stories forced us to face the suffering the Albanians had endured. What does forgiveness and reconciliation look like between peoples with a centuries-old history of fighting and hate? How do Albanians embody forgiveness in the face of such horror and personal loss?

These are some of the complicated issues we wrestled with in our seminars. Ethnic conflict is prevalent throughout the Bible, and in this respect there is nothing new in regards to the Albanian-Serbian conflict. In Matthew 18, Jesus calls his disciples to respond to such conflict with inexhaustible forgiveness. God, as an artist, created ethnicities with beauty and differences. God, in his triune nature, exhibits perfect difference-in-harmony, and it is only through God that different peoples, like the Albanians and the Serbians, can achieve harmony out of discord. In fact, creating harmony out of discord is the very essence of Christ’s redemptive work.

At the end of our time, we were left with more questions than answers. How can we raise up quality leaders in the midst of such religious and ethnic strife? How can the sufferings of the Albanian people be redemptive? As we continue to seek wisdom and understanding, it is our prayer that our efforts are a part of God’s greater plan to redeem and restore Kosova for his glory.

* “Kosova” is the Albanian spelling of the province. “Kosovo” is the Serbian spelling. Given that Kosova is 90 percent Albanian, and that we were working with Albanian students, we have decided to use the Albanian spelling here.

Christ may be the Bread of Life and the Living Water. He satisfies our eternal hunger and thirst. But this must be distinguished from our temporal hunger and thirst. Failure to distinguish the two can be fatal. A few keen medieval women took the metaphor literally, attempting to subsist on the Eucharist alone. They starved to death.

In the Greek language, two sorts of time are specified. Kairos is God’s time—the eternal, divine moment. Kronos is the time that we humans struggle through. And as we are moving in Kronos, no matter what our spiritual state, we still become hungry and thirsty. Food must be produced and water must be purified and clothes must be worn. For while our eternal responsibility is to God, because we commit to acknowledging Kairos, acknowledging the time in which he chooses to work, Kronos is imbued with meaning. And that gives us the weight of other responsibilities, responsibility to and for our families and communities.

Sunday is the day of rest. It is the time in which we recognize the existence of eternal rest. It is the period in which Kronos and Kairos intersect. But not every day can be Sunday. There is a reason God specified that it happened only once every seven days. An old fable is told about a lazy man who wished for a week of Sundays. The first Sunday was routine. The second Sunday was still nice. He attended church and the sermon was of passing interest. His wife gave him leftovers from the previous day. He quite enjoyed his leisure time. But by the third day his wife had nothing left to serve but broth, because all of the shops were closed and food could not be purchased. The priest’s message wasn’t very meaningful, because he had spent all of his energy writing sermons for the previous two days. The man had so much leisure that he became sick of his extra time. As the week progressed, matters only worsened. When the week came to an end, the man realized he now desired work.

God put Adam in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it (Gen 3:15). It was only after the Fall that his work became unpleasant. But it is not constantly unpleasant. We still have ways in which our work satisfies some spiritual need. When I am pursuing knowledge, I often experience the joy of discovery. Each bit of knowledge illuminates the created world. And every sort of work can illuminate the created world. For creation, even in its brokenness, reflects its creator. While creation cannot give us the full picture—that is why direct revelation is necessary—it is still a source of divine understanding.

Once we fully participate in Kairos, we may eternally cry “holy, holy, holy” with our voices. But we are still in Kronos and if our worship is to be constant, it must also flow through our work. Thus, if the Spirit of God were to rush through our house, it would not only manifest itself through musical worship or prayer. It would look like increased understanding in class, joy gained in work at the Lodge, and most excitingly (for me at least) the gifts of every individual would be used to glorify God. So my written work would communicate the joy of creation, and I would be joyful in the process. Whatever one was created to do, one would take joy in completing. And both the process and product would participate in the coming of the Kingdom of God.

* * *

Sometimes, when we ought to be speaking of Kronos, we give answers that really apply to Kairos, and this can be detrimental to one’s own faith as well as the faith of others (which is, perhaps, even more unfortunate than the starvation of well-intentioned ascetics). Jesus himself is often unclear about which he is speaking, such as when he tells the woman at the well that she will thirst no more, when clearly, she will come to that well again. But Jesus was Jesus, and he knew when people needed overstatement. He knew when people needed to be told to gouge out their eyes to avoid lust. But we need to be careful with how we communicate the same precepts. Too often answers such as “God will provide” are given, when God may not choose to provide in the temporal realm. Sometimes he does, and we can petition in prayer. But sometimes he doesn’t. He has promised to work all things together for good, but this is an eternal good, not an earthly good. We live in the light of eternity. We anticipate it. It is almost but not yet. And we need to acknowledge the discomfort of ‘almost.’

Here’s an easy way to see the disconnect between Sunday and Monday. Ask a friend to draw the first five images that come to mind when he or she hears these words: worship, work, ministry, the arts and service. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, we now have five thousand words depicting the disconnect. We also have a clearer picture as to why efforts to “integrate faith and work” generally fail.

From my experience, people draw five different pictures—something like hands raised for worship, a computer for work, people with other people for ministry, musical notes or paint brushes for the arts and people helping people for service. Yet the reality is that throughout the Old Testament, one word—“avodah”—is translated as worship, work, ministry, the arts and service. This doesn’t mean God is tongue-tied or a millenial with a limited vocabulary. The truth is, God sees all five as threads in a seamless fabric labeled avodah. They were all created on the same loom, not cut from different bolts of cloth.

The fabric of avodah has a thread labeled “work” that is found in our human job description: “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”¹ The Hebrew word “work” is avodah.² Yet avodah is also rendered “worship” in Exodus 3:12, making a second thread: “And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.”³ The third and fourth threads are wound tightly together. Avodah is translated as “service” or “ministry” in verses like Numbers 8:11: “The Lord speaks to Moses and Aaron about how the Levites, the priestly class, will do the service of the Lord.”⁴ Great Britain still recognizes service and ministry as threaded together, since the chief civil servant is the Prime Minister.

The fifth thread of avodah is “craftsmanship” or “the arts.” King David, for example, said to his son, Solomon: “The divisions of the priests and Levites are ready for all the work on the temple of God, and every willing man skilled in any craft will help you in all the work.”⁵ Feel the fabric? In one verse alone avodah is rendered two different ways—as “work” and “craftsmanship”—because avodah is a seamless fabric.

A great many Christians don’t have this cloth in their word wardrobe. They imagine worship, service and ministry as confined to Sunday (and an evening Bible study). Work is Monday through Friday. The arts, as one friend put it, “are for people with orange hair.” It’s religious people who have unraveled this fabric into three different bolts of cloth. As Pogo put it, we have met the enemy and he is us.

God didn’t use different looms for the different days of creation. He didn’t cut three fabrics—one for religious people, one for business professionals and one for wierdos with orange hair. The fabric of avodah means there is no such thing as “full time Christian work”—unless we include the butcher, baker and candlestick maker along with monks, missionaries and clergy. All work is worship when done as it ought to be (“worship” comes from the old English word “worth-ship”). All work, paid and unpaid, can be service by loving our neighbor and helping them flourish as human beings made in the image of God. All work can be craftsmanship if it incorporates truth and beauty.

Albert Einstein reminded us that we cannot solve a problem in the framework that created it. This is why efforts to “integrate faith and work” generally fail. “Integration” assumes work and faith are cut from two bolts of cloth. This gives away the game before it has even begun. “Integral” on the other hand comes from the Hebrew word “tôm,” meaning to see all of life as part of a seamless fabric. Jesus himself said, “No one sews a patch of new cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse.”⁶ “Integrating” faith into work is like sewing new cloth on an old garment. It won’t work.

This is tough for some Christians to embrace. Yet coming to faith is only the beginning of being undeceived. In other words, believing also requires unlearning what we previously assumed was right. God created all of life from one loom, so there is an integral and seamless nature to life. There is nothing to integrate. The difference between integral and integrate is not semantics. It’s substantive. Of course, we can’t help others if we don’t see it ourselves. So rather than ask a friend to draw the images that come to mind, maybe we ought to first hone our own pictures. Otherwise, friends might imagine faith and work differently than God does.

This book has provided oil to help my own story and stories and questions and dreams emerge. I woke up thinking of the quick exchange at my sister’s kitchen table in Tennessee that eventually put me on a plane to Maryland in the spring of 2004. I was using my brother-in-law’s computer to look up churches in the area. It was a Saturday night. My sister tossed out the name of one she heard about once or twice. I typed in the name and within moments I scrolled through a list and discovered a Sunday school class that met specifically to discuss Os Guinness’s book, The Call. That was all I needed to entice me to that Baptist church. Later, during a whirlwind three-week trip to Ireland and England in the summer of 2002, I was blessed to hear Os speak on “Prophetic Untimeliness” in Oxford one afternoon. The next year I read many of his books while I sat on a stool in a campground in southern Indiana trying to sort through what I believed.

The Sunday school class in Tennessee led to a connection that led to a phone call or two and then to a plane trip to Maryland (a state I’m certain I had thought about less than ten times a year) to “see about” a job—or really to be seen about. The interview went well and I arrived on site a few months later on August 14. My father dutifully pulled a U-Haul trailer of my stuff. We enjoyed our adventure to Maryland, stopping at battlegrounds in Pennsylvania along the way. We ate pie in a cafe on the edge of Gettysburg. We probably passed a hundred such cafes because I refused to drive on the interstate highways. Dad didn’t argue with this even though he had to pull some fancy mechanical tricks as he hauled my stuff up steep hills on what I think was called Route 30.

Now, on this Saturday afternoon in an old house in Maryland surrounded by water, swans, and seagulls, I think I can puncture (if only puncturing with a stick pin) the lining holding in the feelings and memories and face the fact that I will live here only for about 34 more days. I somehow have never really journaled during my time here. Some sort of “nowness” hasn’t allowed me to remain still enough to let the thoughts seep or pour properly. Housekeeping has lured them out and here I sit trying to type about the dozens of chats while drying dishes, laughter on the back porch, dumping a box of crabs into the bay, philosophical words, endless desserts, and basically what housekeeping has meant in a restored farmhouse full of thirteen or fourteen people.

I want to remember Bob’s stories about his father coming from Iowa to Boston and how he and his wife will be in both the Artic circle and Bermuda this year. I want to remember the surprise bathroom in Ann’s house and the regularly spritzed bathroom of Anne’s. I want to remember when I noticed Lindsay and Scott sharing food in Princeton, New Jersey while we all tried to stay focused on long, firm sentences about art and the Trinity. I want to remember little Joshua quoting scripture and Caroline’s Texan sing-song phrases.

Even as I type I hear a familiar warm-weather sound outside my bedroom windows. It is not the birds, but the clanking of the shuffleboard puck. Spring has really come to Osprey Point and the residents and guests cheer. How will I survive this mental flood that will surely come? On Graduation Day I will not graduate, but I will pass through some sort of ending stage and leave the lodge that night with butterflies in my stomach, tears in my eyes, and a longing to look one more time around the dining room table with the “family” filling every seat.

The den mother is anticipating a type of reverse empty nest (except that the children at home are different every few months), where she leaves instead of the other way around. Marilynne Robinson writes in Housekeeping, “There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door and finally stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

Housekeeping. I never heard that word used when I was a child, or even a teen. In my early twenties I heard a couple of people say it, and another time my elderly landlord inserted it in a sentence. It seemed like an odd word at the time—old-fashioned, slightly romantic and dusty. After reading the book titled by the word I’m left with thoughts of old houses becoming homes for a few years, then houses again. A constant turning-over because people come and go and die, too. I think of bird nests that were full of life and busyness, then abandoned.

The house I live in will go through its quiet cleaning period soon, used, but really “on vacation” for a couple of months. I’ve been here during that time and it becomes like a beach house to wander around in, but you get restless because nothing is ever baking so you just get out of it and back into the sun when you can. But in late summer life begins again, the brood approach the doors, and then time moves, sunset by sunset, into winter, and Windrush House inhabitants will curl up on couches some days and on other days sit on those same couches properly dressed in anything but jeans (otherwise known as “guest speaker attire”) cradling cups of tea and coffee.

In a few weeks I will go to see my mother existing (hopefully not too disoriented) in her new space. She likes to collect clothes, magazines, and recipes. I expect to spend a few evenings redirecting these collections and convincing her use simple organizational systems. She is just getting her rhythm of “one person living in a new town minutes away from- grandchildren” revved up, and I will burst on the scene, accustomed to meals for 16 eaten after singing “Come Thou Fount.” I am eager to bake and plant herbs, but I think I should adjust my mother’s taste buds slowly. One can’t force squash soup, rosemary, duck, beets, and hundreds of olives on a person too quickly. Our housekeeping experience will be interesting.

I expect to have more silence after I leave Maryland. It will take some time to adjust to it. I will love it, but it will make me lonely, too. At least I will have the joy of running around in the Tennessee grass with my precious nieces and nephew. That will be like dancing in sunshine to me. I look forward to cooking experiments with my sister. Maybe Dad will come for a visit and we will tuck most of the children into bed so the adults can have evening conversations just like we observed in Granny’s house many, many moons ago.

Then, there is Nebraska. I’m eager to observe the housekeeping patterns of the Peterson household, but I’ll not speculate on what I’ll learn. I hope the flight from Nashville to Omaha isn’t too long. I want to see the big western sunsets while I remember the ones over the Broad Creek on the Chesapeake Bay. 

I came to the Academy last September excited about the prospects of community living with eleven other college graduates, yet scared about how we were all going to relate to one another. My college experience greatly shaped the way I saw cross-gendered relationships and I was nervous about the prospects of my new relationships and what they would look like.

In college, a conversation with a member of the opposite sex was a huge deal. Eating lunch in the cafeteria with a member of the opposite sex was grandiose. Eyes darted to and from tables spread across the dining hall—the question in everyone’s head, “Are they a couple? Does she like him? Does he like her?” Needless to say I very rarely ate with any member of the opposite sex, and when it did occasionally happen, the barrage of questions afterwards was enough to send me over the edge.

At the Academy this year, I have experienced freedom in my relationships in a way I never thought possible. I can have lunch with a guy and there is no one to stare at the table or to entertain questions of dating. Surely living in a house together removes many of the barriers between genders. The Fellows see each other in a broad range of contexts throughout the day, every day, yet there is still tremendous freedom in relating to one another, be it through an encouraging word or a hug.

Because of my college experience, I came to see relationships between the sexes to serve only one purpose: dating that led to marriage. Yet here at the Academy I have experienced something vastly different. Males and females need each other because each brings a unique viewpoint to the table. Each gender has something profound to offer the other, not only in the context of marriage, but in all areas of life. From the boardroom to the classroom to the manufacturing plant to the bedroom, as God’s image bearers, both male and female have something profound to offer one another in each situation.

Rather than creating man and woman in isolation from one another, God created male and female to work together and in so doing, he created what Carolyn Custis James, in Lost Women of the Bible, calls a “Blessed Alliance.” Within the larger Christian culture, this notion has been lost with the emphasis placed on the complementarian/egalitarian debates and the role of women in the church. But rather than focusing on these more peripheral issues, we in the church need to recover this notion of the “Blessed Alliance.” God blessed Adam and Eve in the garden before he gave them their universal mandate (Gen. 1:28). As James points out,

God’s plan to reveal his image through humanity involved both male and female. Nowhere does God’s image shine more brightly than when men and women join in serving him together. This vital interaction between men and women enriches every aspect of life.

Indeed, relationships between men and women penetrate every area of life. The Christian life can be summed up in one word: relationship. We are called to love God in the context of a relationship and to love others in relationship (John 13:34). Put simply in the words of Dr. Tim Keller, we are called to “live for the redemption of the other.” In my relationships with other men and women, it’s not about what I can get, but what I can give that is truly something marvelous and worth striving for.

As my time at the Academy winds down and all of the Fellows are getting ready to move on to the next chapter in their lives, I know I will look back on this time in my life, grateful for many things, not the least of which is that I learned to love well and how to eat lunch with no one looking. 

My distrust of the phrase began when I first told my friends that I would be spending a year at Osprey Point, a time that would be devoted to discerning my calling and learning to live in Christian community. It was quite clear to my friends that such an experience was not the real world. As a result, the experience was consigned to a certain abstractedness, perhaps rewarding, but not something that would be able to extrude beyond the discrete time spent in the place itself. Once one enters the real world, apparently, the airy considerations of Christian community—or the kind of idealism that corresponds to a “protected” learning experience—must give way to harsher truths of driving to work and paying the bills.

The explanatory power of this contrast between the real world of significant responsibilities and the unreal world of responsible learning should not be doubted. The way in which the life outside of the environs of University or intentional Christian community makes totalizing demands on the time and mind of a person living in it is hardly subject to debate. But that seems to hardly justify giving those demands the credit of being uniquely “real.” To give them this credit, this kind of ontological superiority, is not to prefer realism to idealism, as is often claimed. It is instead to prefer one kind of idealism to others and to mask that choice behind false claims of necessity. The idealism chosen by advocates of the real world is, of course, the idealism of the status quo. It is the belief that what we see is what has to be.

What can be marshaled against an enemy that appears so implacable and so unavoidable? Imagination and the concrete habits of community. Both of these are admittedly fragile, capable of being overrun by the imperial demands of the world that others label real for us. But they are nevertheless the engines of possibility, the means by which hope in another world and another kind of life in that world may be realized. Imagination is the ability to see this other life and this other world, and community is the willingness for a group of people to live as if the imaginative vision were true, creating by virtue of their togetherness a genuinely alternative world. The empire of force that is the “real world” is always working against both of these—seeking to bind our imagination and the character of our lives together to only the possibilities it presents to us. But what can present other possibilities? How do we see beyond the world that presents itself to us as real?

Here we are brought back, as we always must be, to the gospel. It is first of all a matter of gospel truth that we ought to be suspicious of what the world tells us is possible. Jesus Christ came for the redemption of the world and will come again in glory to complete that redemption. This declaration requires a world in need of redemption and therefore a world that is incapable of having the courage of its convictions. For such an imperfect world can only give the provisional and temporary though it claims the authority of finality. The gospel therefore emphatically declares that what we see is not what has to be, and what’s more, is not what will be.

But the gospel does more than warn us. It gives us precisely the life imagined beyond the regnant rules of the world and the community that embodies the truth in that life. The tendrils of the real world are without strength in light of the life of Christ and the life of the church. In Jesus Christ we have the presence of genuine reality, both with us and above us. Our imagination is baptized because now Christ and Christ alone tells us what is necessary. And we are told that we are free.

The world, at the feet of Christ, is subject in all of its goods to that free imagination. And the real world is restrained from taking our imagination captive by dint of its enormity and pressure, for our freedom in Christ is a matter of habitual practice in the church, against which even the gates of hell cannot prevail. The expectations of the world can only be brought to our door—it for us to faithfully decide what comes in. This is our freedom, the freedom we only know is possible because we were visited by that which the world could not contain.

So it may be true that life in our particular Christian community is sheltered—and in a way that others find inimical, or at least unhelpful, to life in the real, outside world. But this is no critique. The University operates under an intuition that some way of distinguishing itself from the world is necessary to teaching, though the outside nevertheless exerts a greater and greater pressure to define what a University is good for. The Christian community, in contrast, operates under a mandate. Our shelteredness cannot be a matter of shame but is instead how we repudiate the authority of the world. And it is in this repudiation that “the real world” is shown to be empty. Its best hope is to exist as a shadow of the real, no more than the actor that has been given a moment and place to take on the figure of someone else. We confuse the actor for the real at our own peril.

Don’t get me wrong. I, like you, find that a lot of my opinions are either wrong or ill-informed, and I regularly learn a lot from watching and reading media analyses of pressing issues. But when things get foggy that shouldn’t, when you easily and accurately predict to your spouse that after commercial brake the next “expert” will say “blah, blah, blah!” and he/she does, its pretty irritating. When this happens, I think media folk can’t face the real issue because that would be too favorable to their opponents or it would expose their own hypocrisy.

Well, I’m getting sick and tired of all the evasion, hand-wringing, and denial about the outbreak of female teachers who are having sex with their junior and senior high school students. And, yes, there is an outbreak. It’s not just that it’s reported more today, though that may be true, too. Media, political, and other cultural leaders who are supposed to serve the public interest by providing helpful diagnoses and solutions for public consideration about our pressing problems are failing us big-time in this issue. No, it’s worse. In my opinion, they don’t want to get at the root of the problem because that would make them too uncomfortable. It would call into question their own beliefs and actions. And it would threaten the entertainment and advertising industries that provide their salaries.

Here’s what’s going on. (1) From 1900-1950 Americans erroneously came to believe that the hard sciences were the only source of knowledge of reality. Anything that could not be tested by empirical science could not be known. The result: political, moral, and religious claims were removed from the realm of knowledge and truth and placed in the privatized realm of personal feeling. Knowledge of moral truth about sexual behavior went the way of the dodo.

(2) In life in general and the area of sexual behavior in particular, the vacuum created by the displacement of knowledge of truth was filled by the desire for satisfaction. The result: Anything goes as long as it doesn’t harm someone else, and no one should judge or limit other people’s quest for instant gratification in the satisfaction of sexual desire.

(3) Sex becomes decoupled from love and marriage and children and is solely a means to pleasure. The result: People become addicted to sexual satisfaction, they live preoccupied with sex throughout each day, and one’s sexual partner becomes a mere object, a mere means to satisfying one’s desire. Any means to an end is disposable if a better means is discovered, so divorce, multiple partners, and surrogate partners (e.g., pornography) become a substitute for real male/female relationships in which sex is one means of mutual pleasure and of the-giving-of-love within the safety net of marriage.

(4) Given that sex becomes a preoccupation and an addiction, movies, magazines, music, and, yes, advertisements are created to offer us American addicts a regular fix. Even news programs that cover female teachers having sex with students do not rest content to report the story. Instead, they must offer sexual goodies that titillate viewers and assure them of ratings. The result: People’s actual sexual lives in marriage are boring and relatively meaningless and they must find a regular fix, a constant dosage of sexual titillation that keeps them from feeling their own sexual emptiness and the general sexual addiction of their lives.

(5) Detached from love and marriage, and in light of the general sexual addiction of the average American (as seen by the regular need for sexual titillation surfaced and gratified by almost all television, movies and music), sex becomes a form of power—power over others, power to achieve social prestige and recognition, power to get what one wants.

(6) In spite of the good that a chastened form of feminism accomplished, without the guidance of traditional objective morality, it gave women the wrong message: namely, it taught women points one through five above. Accordingly women increasingly fall victim to our ordinary socialization process. Ergo: More female teachers are having sex with their students.

This isn’t rocket science, and these points are obvious and available to anyone willing to do some historical research. So why are the talking heads so befuddled about female teacher/student sex? You can now figure out the answer. Here’s a hint: The problem may be with the very industry (and the culture it has helped to create) that is confused. If the problem is clearly identified, it would be too uncomfortable, to hard to handle for those who are best served by keeping the issue obfuscated.

Have you got a better analysis than mine? If so, I’d love to see it. If not, maybe you could identify where we went wrong and how you contribute to the problem. That’s what I’m doing. May God have mercy on us all.

But over the last few years, despite my childhood, I unconsciously developed a deep skepticism toward beauty. Whether it was beautiful people or beautiful places, I discovered that beauty can often be used as a veneer to hide ugly things.

Sunflower Fantasy IV by Ruth Kimbrough

I became cynical, too, toward beautiful places, like the campus of Furman University where I was an undergraduate. Several experiences have nurtured in me a concern for people who are marginalized and disadvantaged by society. My first reading of these experiences led me to see gorgeous homes and immaculately landscaped lawns as manifestations of the injustice that characterizes this broken world. Nowhere was this more apparent than in South Africa—I traveled there in winter 2005 with a group from Furman—where, under the tyrannical laws of apartheid, black laborers constructed some of the most beautiful resort locations on earth—for privileged white people. As I realized that beauty could be used as a disguise for sin, I began to feel hardness in my heart toward virtually any manifestation of beauty.

I began to see the creation of beauty (the arts, landscaping) as an activity unrelated to—even opposed to—the work of social justice. I guess I felt a little self-righteous about it. Those who labor to make things beautiful often serve only those with wealth, and I wanted no part of that. I wanted to do the work of social justice.

Thus the irony when, in September, I found myself at the Osprey Point Retreat and Conference Center, where the Trinity Forum Academy is housed in a breathtakingly beautiful environment on the Chesapeake Bay. I could not have landed in a more awkward place for someone wary of beauty. Not only is the place naturally beautiful, my work here could easily be called “beautification”—making the bathrooms spotless, polishing the silverware until it looks like little mirrors, and preparing and serving impeccable plates of delicious gourmet food.

Being at Osprey Point has allowed me to identify and to reconsider some of my skepticism toward beauty and those who work to achieve it. This has happened on a purely practical level—it’s hard to despise people who work to make things beautiful when you and your friends are those people—and on a more theoretical level.

I’m thinking specifically about what is often called “the cultural mandate” in Genesis 2. God creates humans, male and female, in his image to “have dominion” over the earth. He tells them to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it. What does this mean? One way of expressing the historic Christian interpretation is this: when God says “fill the earth and subdue it,” he intends Adam and Eve to make the earth more beautiful by ordering and taming its forces and materials in a way that gives glory to God and extends his image and purposes. He made a beautiful, good earth, yet he gave Adam and Eve further work to do: Tend the garden. Before the fall, this must have meant creative, artful acts like animal-naming and landscape architecture (Gen 2:15). In other words, humans were to order and arrange God’s good creation in such a way that made it even more beautiful.

Everything, of course, changes dramatically after the Fall. Genesis 4 and 5 have no attention for beautification of the created world. Cain murders his brother and is banished to wander and build a city. Crime and social injustice crop up everywhere. This is the world that we live in now. How can anyone concern themselves with cultivating gardens when the world is full of injustice?

What does the cultural mandate look like in a world that is fallen? Are we to ignore the pre-Fall directive to make the earth more beautiful and glorifying to God? I don’t think so. But now, social justice work is necessarily integrated into the fulfillment of the original mandate. The seemingly separate pursuits of art/beautification and social justice are actually complimentary tasks on a continuum toward the fulfillment of God’s design. This recognition is melting my secret cynicism toward beauty.

The fact is, we cannot simultaneously make beauty and neglect the work of justice; the decay of the world—war and crime specifically—will corrupt and destroy our art. Just as the briar and thistle will overcome our gardens if we do not fight them back, graffiti, theft, or war may eventually shatter the environs we work to make beautiful.

Neither can we sustain social justice work without eyes to see and love beauty. The goal of working for justice cannot simply be the alleviation of such social ills as poverty. Those who work with the needy must have a positive aim, some conception of the beautiful society toward which they seek to move. It is essential that those who love justice also taste and see what is beautiful; if they do not, their work will be marked by cynicism and despair.

When I think back to my parents’ living room and my mother’s artwork, I smile. I do not think it is a coincidence that, after growing up in a household filled with warmth and beauty, I have come to care about social justice. Tasting and seeing what is beautiful has taught me why I must care for the needy—not merely to alleviate suffering, but to invite others to enjoy and participate in what is good and beautiful about God’s world.  

In my mind, the purpose of the Bible study was, obviously, studying the Bible. Like the sermon on Sunday, the measure of Tuesday’s gathering was how much we learned about the Bible—and, by extension, about God. Fellowship before and prayer after, though important, were the crescendo and decrescendo. In this way of thinking I found knowing God got easily confused with knowing about God, and learning was mistaken for growth.

When I moved to DC, I got involved in a “small group” through Kairos, the young adult service of The Falls Church. This group felt similar to the college studies of which I’d been a part . . . and it petered out after six months.

Around the time it ended, I was asked to serve as the first “small groups coordinator” for Kairos. My predisposition to the “back-row Christian male” mentality pulled me away, but my theology, particularly the communal emphasis in learning and life at the Academy, pushed me to say yes. Kairos at that point had fourteen groups: four of men, eight of women, and two coed. Four dropped to three around the New Year as my second group dissipated and I found myself a “coordinator” without a group.

That winter and spring I reflected on my eighteen months in the “real world,” on church, and on life in this young and transient city, filtering them through my collegiate and Academy experiences: “What’s going on here—in me, in this church, in this city?”

I’ve come to believe that the greatest problem of my generation is loneliness. This includes the church. I’ve seen in others—and at times felt myself—varying degrees of a deep sadness coupled with an intense but poorly expressed longing to be known. People smile loudly in the often vacuous urban busyness: at work, exercising, at happy hour, driving, after church . . . you name it. But the silence that follows these smiles—the silence from which we run—weighs heavier each day it is avoided. Forget our highly touted e-connectedness. Presence matters now more than ever, and in a distinctly new and more urgent way than it did to my parent’s generation.

But presence, this thing most needed and desired in this age, is something we in the church already have—or ought to have: the presence of people and of God, of places to know and to be known in an ever-deepening way.

Responding to aloneness and absence begins as we consider how to offer this presence to those of us already in the church, and then how to welcome others into it. In any church the prime place for fostering presence is in small gatherings, consistent and persistent in time and people—a reliable place for members to know and be known. I began to see that fellowship and community, those amorphous things, usually only happen in the context of other things, and these things began to take on new and paramount importance. Names and semantics began to matter.

The purpose of “small group” in my mind, and later in reality, ballooned beyond Bible study to include meals, nursing home visits, talking, meeting at a bar, helping organize a Christmas party in Anacostia, movie-watching, baking, foosball—did I mention eating together?—listening to music, hosting Thanksgiving dinner, and reading the same book. And the list goes on. Study remained a group essential, as did prayer. But hopefully in the midst of other activities for their own sake, relationships and trust could form, in the context of which study and prayer, growth and healing, service and invitation, accountability and rebuke, all could more effectively and naturally take place.

This shift in my thinking and approach has proved particularly meaningful for our men’s groups. I’ve realized that sitting in a circle for an hour in conversation, study, or prayer with guys I don’t really know just doesn’t work for me. But playing darts with the same guys changes everything—the group I’m in has been keeping score since we started in September. After spending this sort of time together, we somehow can talk better about 1 & 2 Samuel, Eugene Peterson’s Leap Over a Wall, the day, or the prayer we need for our work/family/girlfriend (or lack thereof). Six months in, my experience is as day to night compared with every other group I’ve been in.

My group’s experience is consistent with what I’ve heard from people in other groups. Though I strongly hesitate to quote numbers, in this instance, I must. Six months after we began to emphasize small groups within Kairos, and to accentuate the significance of fellowship within small groups, we now have eight men’s groups, over ten women’s groups, two coed groups, and a married and engaged couples group all meeting regularly.

A rigorous intellect is central to our faith, as is the study of the Bible. If my mind could not find my faith reasonable I would worship elsewhere, or not at all. But I don’t believe that what my generation, particularly those outside the church, needs most is intellectual reasons for belief in God, demonstrations of the consistency of science and faith, or even systematic interpretations of Scripture. Though all of these continue to be of importance, they are responses to yesterday’s pressing questions . . . and they are discussions better addressed, as they arise, in the context of community.

We must first remind ourselves of the extent to which we are known by God—fully—and then pursue as well as receive the possibility, the reality, and the primacy of such deep knowledge of him, which by his design happens largely as we come to know each other in the same way. Who would have thought this breadth encompassed Johnny Cash, darts, and chips and salsa on a Thursday night?  

The conference began on Friday evening with a talk given by Micheal Flaherty, the president of Walden Media. Micheal showed clips from Amazing Grace and spoke about the concept of integrity in the film industry. He shared about the personal journey that led him to found Walden Media and reminded us that true dedication to a cause, like the abolition of slavery or the reformation of the film industry, may require a lifetime. 

Doug Holladay opened up Saturday by tracing Wilberforce’s life, highlighting politics as the vehicle that Wilberforce used to accomplish his goal. Doug exhorted us to be equally creative with our gifts, insisting that Christians do not have to work in the mission field or in youth ministry to be doing God’s will. Although some are called to these noble roles, others should consider politics, business, academia, and so on. Doug encouraged Christians, and specifically young Christians, to find a niche and dedicate a lifetime to its reformation. Doug also emphasized that such work cannot be done alone. Using the Clapham Circle as an example, Doug outlined the importance of finding a group for accountability and for support in living out your faith.

Saturday afternoon we heard from Jeff Hunt, part of the recently developed Clapham Group, on the ways they are promoting knowledge of Wilberforce’s life and contributions. Paul McCusker from Focus on the Family followed Jeff, highlighting their new radio dramas on the lives of William Wilberforce, John Newton, and Olaudah Equiano in the years leading up to the events Amazing Grace treats. Chuck Stetson spoke on the upcoming Wilberforce documentary, The Better Hour.

The diversity of the talks spurred lively conversation among our eighty-five guests. Each of the presenters emphasized that it may take a lifetime to implement true change, and each of our speakers exemplified dedication to change and to the cause of Christ.

As a staff member of the Academy, I was most rewarded by watching the activity leading up to the weekend. The Fellows poured countless hours into cleaning, planning, praying, and coordinating a successful event. These were memorable times of bonding as a community, but they also contained moments of stress, frustration, and anxiety. Although the Fellows are a young group that is just forming, they are not dissimilar from the Clapham Circle. The Conference provided one of their first group ventures, and the Lord blessed them with success and a more tightly-knit community.

Perhaps one of the most notable moments of the weekend was when the Fellows and a few other conference attendees gathered around Kimberly Smith and laid hands on her, lifting her up in fervent prayer before she departed for two months in Sudan. The power of Christ and his commission for justice was tangible.

Many thanks to those of you who were present—you played a large part in a successful weekend! For those who weren’t, we hope to have you as our guests next year.  

To begin, I would like to survey what the advocates on untrammeled embryo stem cell research really want; then make some comments on what this debate means for the biotech century ahead.

First: They want cloning. Behind the stem-cell research debate lies the plan for human cloning for research. The emotional case that was made by celebrities like Christopher Reeve and Nancy Reagan is for so-called “therapeutic cloning,” in which one-on-one medications are developed for degenerative diseases from specially cloned embryos. The public seems to think this is just around the corner, but even if it were to work (and some key stem cell research advocates themselves now acknowledge that it will not) it would be many, many years away.

They want to clone human embryos. They are not really interested in a few more cell lines, or access to so-called “spare” embryos in in vitro clinic freezers. These make good debating points, but they are peripheral to their main aims. So-called “therapeutic cloning,” which has proved so powerful in mobilizing the public imagination, requires the manufacture and destruction of millions upon millions of embryos, each one of which requires an egg from the ovary of a woman. What few Americans realize is that around the world nation after nation has outlawed this unethical research. Germany, France, Canada, and Norway have all decided to turn “therapeutic cloners” into felons.

Second: They want to patent embryos. Pro-cloning campaigners have asserted their right to the ownership of embryos that had been altered or engineered. Both BIO, the biotech industry trade group, and the so-called “campaign for medical research,” went on the offensive in response to an effort led by Congressman Dave Weldon to ensure that patents would not be granted on human embryos. They claimed that this would prevent “cures.” They were defeated, but they are expected to try again.

Third: They want to grow cloned human embryos—and then it gets even worse. They want to implant them, and to harvest the developing fetus for experiments and spare parts. This horrific scenario would have been thought unbelievable before New Jersey passed its “stem cell research” policy. It permits cloning for experimental purposes all the way through to birth. And the Biotechnology Industry Organization—to its everlasting shame—testified and lobbied in favor of what is plainly the worst biotech law in the world.

Fourth: They want to play with the English language to try and shape the terms of the debate. In a manner that has deeply troubling implications for the health of democracy, there has been a series of efforts at changing the meaning of plain words to deceive the public. So, for example, in S. 303—the Senate bill proposed by Senators Hatch (R-UT) and Feinstein (D-CA) to protect embryo research cloning—the word cloning is defined in a wholly novel way, to refer to the implantation of the embryo. (In the New Jersey law, cloning is defined as birth!) Yet S. 303 denies that the clonal embryo is an embryo at all, and makes up a new term for it: an “unfertilized blastocyst.” Without honest language, democracy is dead.

What lies behind this debate?

Whatever our views may be on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell work, three home truths are becoming clearer by the minute.

First: The real debate is about the capacity of our society to ensure that biotechnology, with its Pandora’s box of possibilities, will serve the human good. We recognize that there are huge safety issues (remember thalidomide, the drug used in pregnancy that led to the birth in Europe of thousands of limbless babies? And look at how readily embryonic stem cells cause tumors). We don’t want “designer babies” who have “features” picked by their parents. We may disagree about where exactly we need to draw lines, but we take it for granted that drawing lines is going to be necessary if these new technologies are going to be used in ways that are not just profitable but ethical and safe.

Second: If you think that is just an expression of opinion, look at the biotech market. Investors are not investing in embryo stem cell technology. They have the best information, and they are used to investing in products with 10–15 year timelines. Like the big pharmaceutical companies, they know better than to put their money into something so speculative. So—surprise, surprise—the researchers and their celebrity advocates are asking for public funding!

Third: The media has consistently refused to tell the whole story. We need more and better information. How many Americans are actually aware that so-called “adult stem cells” have led to cures in many terrible diseases, and hundreds of patients? How many are aware that cloning and other biotech abuses (such as embryo patenting) are opposed by leading progressive voices as well as conservatives? How many know that cloning has been comprehensively banned in nations as diverse as Germany, Norway, Canada, and France? Each of these nations has now made it a crime to clone embryos, whether for research, to produce babies, or for any other purpose—precisely the position that has been endorsed by President Bush.

These questions are as big as they come. What are the chances that the democracies will be able to handle these extraordinary new technologies? In a culture inebriated by a fawning love of celebrity and a brittle fear of degenerative disease, will it ever prove possible to say no?

Put the question another way: As we advance into the biotech century, will any future president dare to wrestle with a profound ethical dilemma, propose a principled compromise, and draw a line—knowing that he or she is liable to face the unprincipled hype of a celebrity-led “cures now” campaign?

We need solid answers to these questions, and it behooves those of goodwill on all sides of the embryonic stem cell debate to start worrying about what they will be.