Resources from the Trinity Forum

By Alan Paton
Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald
(1996)

Few stories illustrate the gritty realism of the search for reconciliation better than Alan Paton’s novel portraying a Zulu pastor and his family in a beautiful land torn apart by racial injustice. This heart-wrenching account played a part in what was called “the South African miracle.”

Although the story is set in South Africa, it strikes universal themes: the journey to reconciliation, the challenge of racial understanding, the fellowship of suffering, the miracle of forgiveness, and the relationship of victim and offender, father and son, families and communities. These issues are conveyed especially well through the vehicle of fiction.

How Much Land Does a Man Need?

By Leo Tolstoy
Foreword by Os Guinness
(1996)

The 2007 edition includes a Discussion Guide. Or download a PDF here.

Tolstoy’s timeless short story about a Russian farmer driven by an endless quest for more land still provokes thought today.

Also available as a CD audio recording

What is the meaning of money? What is success? How should we pursue happiness? How much is enough?

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), the Russian writer and social reformer, famous for writing the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Born to a noble, landed family, his early years were marked by a dissolute life and a violent reaction to the horrors of the Crimean War. In 1862 he married and settled down, producing thirteen children and a burst of literary successes. But after writing Anna Karenina he experienced a profound spiritual crisis and renounced his literary ambitions, believing them to be incompatible with his deepest convictions. His numerous later works were on religious and moral subjects. “How Much Land Does a Man Need?,” written in 1886, and translated from the Russian by Louise and Aylmer Maude, is from this later period.

It is an enduring story that reveals the sometimes insidious and sometimes overt destructiveness of greed—the deadly sin of avarice or avaritia—and challenges us to question our own self-awareness.

William Wilberforce

A Man Who Changed His Times

By John Pollock
Foreword by J. Douglas Holladay
(1996)

Discussion Guide included in recent editions; Download a PDF guide here.

An account of the life and achievement of history’s most influential reformer, William Wilberforce. A man of faith who made a difference, Wilberforce was instrumental in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Biographer John Pollock has adapted a lecture given at the British National Gallery for this exclusive Reading, which comes closer than any other to representing the vision and mission of The Trinity Forum today.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

By Mark A. Noll
(Eerdmans, 1995)

Unsparing in his judgment, Mark Noll asks why the largest single group of religious Americans—who enjoy increasing wealth, status, and political influence—have contributed so little to rigorous intellectual scholarship in North America.

Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft

By Douglas M. Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, eds.
(Oxford University Press, 1995)

The first systematic account of modern cases in which religious or spiritual factors have played a helpful role in preventing or resolving conflict and achieving non-violent socio-political change, composed by distinguished scholars.

Democracy On Trial

By Jean Bethke Elshtain, et al
(Basic Books, 1995)

A response to critics of democracy, ancient and modern, that aims to open up a dialogue and move us beyond sterile sectarian disputes.

The Content of America’s Character

Recovering Civic Virtue

By Don Eberly
(Madison Books, 1995)

Essays from prominent American thinkers on what individuals can do to re-establish their bonds with society.

Creation at Risk?

Religion, Science, and Environmentalism

By Michael Cromartie
(ISI Books, 1995)

Ten scholars and activists explore—and clash over—some of the scientific, religious, moral, philosophical, economic, and political claims advanced by contemporary environmentalists.

When the Almond Tree Blossoms

A Novel

By David Aikman
(Thomas Nelson, 1995)

A thriller novel of international politics and the struggle for freedom.

The Wager

and Other Selections from the Pensées

By Blaise Pascal and Peter Kreeft
Foreword by Os Guinness
(1995)

Discussion guide included in recent printings.

This excerpt from the classic text comes with helpful modern commentary by philosopher Peter Kreeft.

As America’s and the world’s crises seem to come ever thicker and faster, many people’s thoughts progressively lower until all they care about is the immediate, the practical, the urgent, and the short-term—the “payoff” and the “bottom line.”

Others, however, realize that the deeper the practical problems, the more urgent the need for higher answers. Such people cry out for the wisdom of the ages to address the challenges of today. This edition of the Trinity Forum Reading introduces a best-selling, perennial classic that has always appealed when people are thinking deeply about the human condition—Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (or Thoughts).

Pascal was a seventeenth-century genius, brilliant especially in mathematics. Heralded today as the father of the modern computer, his reputation in his own day rested on his scientific and technical innovations, including the first omnibus system for Paris. His Pensées, however, grew out of his keen insight into the human predicament. Pascal was forming these unfinished jottings into a comprehensive book when, after years of chronic sickness, he died at the age of thirty-nine.

The Purchase of a Soul

A Tale of Transformation from Les Misérables

By Victor Hugo
Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald
(1995)

Download the Discussion Guide for this Reading (PDF)

Few stories capture the dynamic power of gifts better than this celebrated incident in Victor Hugo’s much-loved Les Misérables.

Also available as a CD audio recording

For many people, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables will always be “Les Miz,” a snatch of a song or Cosette’s haunting, waif-like face on a million posters and album covers. Yet Hugo’s masterwork embodies so much more than even the best musical can portray—an immense drama of human pathos set in the wrenching conditions of nineteenth-century France.

In a culture where giving often seems overwhelmed by buying, it is worth pondering the unique nature of gifts and giving. One great difference between a gift and a possession is that a gift must be passed on. True giving has no expectation of exchange. Giving can therefore have an enormous ennobling benefit when it introduces the one who receives the gift into the new world of undeserved favor—approaching the spiritual wonder of grace.

“The Purchase of a Soul” excerpts an encounter that sets the stage for the full novel. Convict 24601—Jean Valjean, hardened and embittered but newly released from prison—is transformed by his interaction with the Bishop of Digne, a character based on a real-life bishop. The story is one of the most moving incidents in Western literature.

Alonzo L. McDonald introduces this selection and highlights its many applications for today.

The Journey

Our Quest for Faith and Meaning

By Edited by Os Guinness with Ginger Koloszyc
(1995)

As the seasons of our individual lives intersect with the mounting problems in Western societies, many leaders are approaching the wisdom of Socrates—“An unexamined life is not worth living”—with new seriousness.

The Journey offers a series of readings that chart a thinking person’s road to faith. It has been prepared for two kinds of people—those who do not view themselves as people of faith, but who are serious about the big questions on the journey of life; and those who are at some stage along the journey of faith, but have not had occasion to reflect deeply on why they believe what they believe.

The Masterless

Self and Society in Modern America

By Wilfred M. McClay
(University of North Carolina Press, 1994)

A treatment of the long-standing tension between individualism and social cohesion in conceptions of American culture.

Paperback: 380 pages

In this provocative book, Wilfred McClay explores ideas of unity and diversity as they have evolved since the Civil War, he illuminates the historical background to our ongoing search for social connectedness and sources of authority in a society increasingly dominated by the premises of individualism. McClay borrows D. H. Lawrence’s term ‘masterless men’—extending its meaning to women as well—and argues that it is expressive of both the promise and the peril inherent in the modern American social order.

Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines—including literature, sociology, political science, philosophy, psychology, and feminist theory—McClay identifies a competition between visions of dispersion on the one hand and coalescence on the other as modes of social organization. In addition, he employs intellectual biography to illuminate the intersection of these ideas with the personal experiences of the thinkers articulating them and shows how these shifting visions are manifestations of a more general ambivalence about the process of national integration and centralization that has characterized modern American economic, political, and cultural life.

The Dust of Death

The Sixties Counterculture and How It Changed America Forever

(Crossway, 1994)

Paper, 409 pages.