Faiths and Worldviews
Items on religions, ideologies, philosophies, and other ways people interpret the world
Worries About Europe
Wed 13 Dec 2006 by Al McDonald
A response from the founding chairman of the Trinity Forum.
Dear Trinity Forum Friends:
This is to commend the fine essay by David Aikman on “Civilization and Crisis and Europe’s Choices.” It is a superbly reasoned piece that I fully endorse. My only reservation is that the threat of Islamic extremism is certainly as grave as David suggests and he may have even understated the danger.
My worries about Europe are even greater than David’s expressed concerns. I suspect Europe’s only chance to counter the infiltration and ultimate force of the Islamic youth movement and immigration is with a solid Christian revival as David mentioned has happened before historically. Yet, at the moment I see little acceptance in Europe by the general public or governmental officials of Christianity or even its basic tenets, ignoring almost completely the deep Christian roots that have shaped Europe’s enormous success near the pinnacle of civilization for many generations.
A Short History of Happiness
Tue 12 Dec 2006 by Wilfred M. McClay
Fragile, but not Illusory
We want happiness, but the harder we chase it, the further off it seems. How can we talk about it without sounding cynical or trite? Senior Fellow Bill McClay, in a cheerful but deeply realistic piece, looks to history and human nature—and some Russian literature—to help us understand it and to bring our expectations about happiness into line.
Civilization’s Crisis and Europe’s Choices
Tue 05 Dec 2006 by David Aikman
Ideology, Intolerance, and Identity
Senior Fellow David Aikman discusses the European crisis highlighted by militant Islam and considers its sources, current factors, and—given historical precedents—the prospects for a revitalized Continent.
Atheism and Moral Clarity
Thu 30 Nov 2006 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
A recent book by a militant anti-theist helps to clarify the true sources of attack on our civilization.
A 2004 New York Times best-seller by Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason placed its author, a graduate in philosophy from Stanford, in the forefront of the forefront of anti-theists in America. In his latest book, Letter to a Christian Nation, published in September 2006, Harris brings his heavy artillery as close as he can to the walls of the church. His intention, he writes, is “to destroy the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.” Welcome to the tradition of Voltaire, Engels, and an eccentric Soviet magazine founded under Lenin called The Godless.
The Christian faith has survived more learned and eloquent assaults than those of Sam Harris, and will doubtless continue to do so.
Reconnecting Spirituality and Knowledge
Thu 30 Nov 2006 by Mark D. Filiatreau
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology by Eugene Peterson. Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005. 368 pages, including back matter.
“There comes a time for most of us when we discover a deep desire within us to live from the heart what we already know in our heads and do with our hands. But ‘to whom shall we go?’” —Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places
It is a commonplace that Christian spirituality is not what it used to be. Then again, it never was—just read Paul’s letters to Corinth for a reminder. Nevertheless, each age has its particular challenges. The besetting problem for Christians in the industrialized West has long been a valorization of propositional knowledge and restless activity at the expense of other movements of the soul such as imagination, love, silence, and desire. Indeed, this privileging of the acquisition of knowledge is at the expense of “knowing” itself, as the word is meant in the Bible. Such an emphasis is a key to why the integrity and power that so radically changed the Roman Empire has long been missing—and it is the Evangelical wing of the church in North America that I’m talking about.
Lennox on Dawkins
Tue 14 Nov 2006 by TTF Staff
Senior Fellow John Lennox has a downloadable audio lecture and seminar discussing Richard Dawkins and his views on God, religion, and science.
The 2005 lecture is an MP3 hosted at bethinking.org. It’s 29 MB and runs over two hours, including questions and answers.
The Human Race
Mon 30 Oct 2006 by Paul Johnson
A Success or a Failure?
Historian Paul Johnson reflects on the history and prospects of the human race in a provocative lecture to the Trinity Forum in Europe. At the rate we are going, will the human race survive? Does it deserve to survive? It’s rarely a pretty picture, he says, but yet there is hope.
The Revolution in France
Sat 21 Oct 2006 • Responses: 4 • by David Aikman
Why are so many French immigrants so obviously not integrated into French society? Perhaps they don’t want to be.
Last fall, when hundreds of cars were torched in suburban housing estate communities in Paris and across France, it was clear that the perpetrators were very largely Arab immigrants to France from former French colonies in North Africa. In addition to the property damage and vandalism, there was violence against people, with the police often being targeted. Yet at the time, the French political establishment and the French media elite were united in proclaiming that all of the mayhem had nothing to do with the vandals’ religion. These unfortunates, they said, were angry because they hadn’t been successfully integrated into French society.
That much was true. The question is, why not? Is it possible they didn’t want to be?
On Not Leaving Theology to the Professionals
Thu 12 Oct 2006 by Peter Edman
Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian: A Reader, compiled and introduced by Paul Weston (Eerdmans/SPCK, 2006, ISBN 0802829821); 264 pages plus notes, bibliography, and index.
Since Implications is directed at business and professional leaders you may wonder why our first formal book review is about theology. The reason is that all of us, consciously or not, are theologians, and as Andrzej Turkanik said at a recent emerging leaders forum, the question is, what kind of theologians are we?
Most of us tend to leave the deep thinking to the “professionals,” and as Lesslie Newbigin says, “Theology has been largely the preserve of clergy and academics.” He said this as a challenge to the average follower of Jesus, reminding us that we have a deeper responsibility than we sometimes wish to acknowledge. We must not be satisfied with a superficial understanding and there are significant dangers when you leave everything to the professionals. We thus start with this collection of writings of the great missionary bishop and theologian who died in 1998, for it offers a framework for the type of approach we will often take.
Ethics in Guerrilla Warfare
Fri 08 Sep 2006 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
“Just war principles work successfully only among nations that acknowledge the same moral laws at work.”
In Israel, from which I have just returned, I saw the effects of the explosions of 30,000 ball-bearings when Hezbollah warheads carrying them crashed in among or near civilian residences. In Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, steel guardrails on roads were peppered with holes shot clean through them, entire halves of three-story houses were demolished. Dozens of Israeli civilians were killed by these random—but deliberate—assaults.
How do you fight a war against fanatical fighters who hide themselves and their weapons amid civilians and deliberately aim those same weapons against civilians in another country?
