The Trinity Forum :: Resources :: A Faith and Culture Devotional

Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

By Dallas Willard
(HarperOne, 1998)

"The Divine Conspiracy" gracefully weaves biblical teaching, popular culture, science, scholarship, and spiritual practice into a tour de force that shows the necessity of profound changes in how we view our lives and faith.

Religion and the American Civil War

By Randall Miller, Charles Reagan Wilson, Harry S. Stout, eds.
(Oxford University Press, 1998)

The sixteen essays in this volume, all previously unpublished, address the little considered question of the role played by religion in the American Civil War.

Augustine and the Limits of Politics

By Jean Bethke Elshtain
(University of Notre Dame Press, 1998)

Why Augustine? Why now? Elshtain brings Augustine's thought into the contemporary political arena and presents a man who created a complex moral map that offers space for loyalty, love, and care, as well as a chastened form of civic virtue.

The Call

Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life

By Os Guinness
(Thomas Nelson, 1998)

A new paperback edition includes a workbook.

The Call continues to stand as a classic, reflective work on life’s purpose. Best-selling author Os Guinness goes beyond our surface understanding of God’s call and addresses the fact that God has a specific calling for our individual lives.

Why am I here? What is God’s call in my life? How do I fit God’s call with my own individuality? How should God’s calling affect my career, my plans for the future, my concepts of success? Guinness now helps the reader discover answers to these questions, and more, through a corresponding workbook - perfect for individual or group study.

America’s Promise

Civil Society and the Renewal of American Culture

By Don Eberly
(Rowman & Littlefield, 1998)

Telling Truth to Kings

By Reinhold Schneider
Foreword by Os Guinness
(1998)

Bartolomé de Las Casas’ stand against Spanish depravity in the New World raises good questions for our own time.

From the prophet Jeremiah and John the Baptist in the ancient world down to Edmund Burke on the French Revolution, Winston Churchill in his wilderness years, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, a recurring theme of history is the “unheeded messenger.” One of the least known but most courageous twentieth century voices is that of Reinhold Schneider, the German Catholic novelist and poet whose works were so pointed that they were banned by the Nazis in the 1930s.

This excerpt from Schneider’s most famous novel, Las Casas Before Charles V, is at first sight about the corruption of sixteenth-century Spain and the courageous opposition of the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas to Spanish abuses in the New World. But a deeper reading shows it addresses 1930s Germany—and America and Europe today, for Las Casas’ stand against Spanish depravity raises hard questions for our own time.

What qualities of character are required to address truth to power? How can it be done when the king is “we the people”? What hinders contemporary holders of power from hearing truth? This moving story raises questions that are urgent for concerned citizens today.

Man’s Search for Meaning

By Viktor E. Frankl
Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald
(1998)

A discussion guide is included in recent printings.

From the horrors of his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps, Frankl achieved an insight into human nature that actually saved his life in the camps.

He later adapted this approach into his psychological school of logotherapy. This insight is that the search for meaning in life is the prime motivational force for human beings—and an absolute essential for their mental health. This Reading excerpts his acclaimed book on the subject, a modern classic that tells the very personal and courageous story of his fight for existence and meaning in the midst of absolute brutality and evil.

The Great Experiment

Faith and Freedom in the American Republic

By Edited by Os Guinness with Ginger Koloszyc
(1998)

Can human beings establish good government simply through reflection and choice? Can a free people govern itself? Can a self-governing people sustain its freedom?

These questions, central to the thoughts of the framers of the American republic, are now somewhat unfashionable. But the framers knew that they were embarking on an experiment that would not sustain itself. They saw that the greatest danger the republic would face would be its own success. Additionally, they would be surprised at the current perception of religion in public life as irrational, reactionary, divisive to society, and best quarantined from public life. The framers clearly gave as their best advice for sustaining liberty the maintenance of a socially constructive religion among the citizens. If they are correct, it is freedom itself at stake.

This curriculum is written, first, for all who seek to understand the genius of the American experiment and the framers’ understanding of how it may be sustained. Second, it is for all who have an interest in the continuing vitality of American leadership in the world, including citizens of other countries who realize that the experience of the world’s “first new nation” has lessons, for better or for worse, for all the nations of the modern world. Third, it is for everyone who wants to address the role of faith in public life—who wants to know how we can live with our deepest differences.

Love Your God with All Your Mind

The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul

By Dallas Willard
(NavPress Publishing Group, 1997)

An invaluable book aiding the concerned Christian in the battle for the Christian intellect, "Love Your God With All Your Mind" offers a no-holds-barred approach to fixing what's gone wrong in the Church.

Religion in American History

A Reader

By Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, eds.
(Oxford University Press, 1997)

Offering a rich selection of classic and recent scholarship, "Religion in American History: A Reader' presents an extraordinary portrait of religion's fate across four centuries of the American experience.

Shantung Compound

By Langdon Gilkey
Foreword by Os Guinness
(1997)

Group Discussion Guide available here as a PDF download.

This modern classic offers a live laboratory experiment exploring the tensions of life.

When the props of society are removed, how do people survive—and act? How do crises sort out the leaders from the led? How do they crystallize character from convention? Virtue from hypocrisy? What is the role and relevance of faith?

Gilkey draws from the journals of his time in a Japanese internment camp in China during World War II to tell the story of how prisoners from many nationalities were forced to create a miniature society—and face the moral and political quandaries intensified by camp life. Sometimes disturbing, sometimes surprising, sometimes humorous, Shantung Compound highlights the dilemmas of the modern condition of humanity and the responsibility and ingenuity required to tackle our problems today.

Selections from this memoir are introduced by Os Guinness, whose foreword addresses the tragic element of history. An Englishman, he was born in China and, with the other foreigners, was forced to leave after the Chinese revolution. Several of his friends, in fact, were in the camp with Gilkey.

One Word of Truth

A Portrait of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

By David Aikman
Foreword by Os Guinness and Richard Ohman
(1997)

In 1989, David Aikman, then a journalist with Time magazine, was granted the first major interview Solzhenitsyn had given an American news organization for years.

Trinity Forum Senior Fellow David Aikman’s engaging and lively account portrays an amazing man who has devoted his life to the battle for truth. The story of this “apostle of truth” is starkly contrasted with our current culture, for today we are experiencing a severe crisis of truth on many levels. In academia, what once was “self-evident” is now “relative” or “socially constructed.” But truth has died not only at the hands of scholars, but at the hands of politicians, advertisers, and preachers. We are all well-schooled in the art of bending, shaping, and “finessing” the truth.

As our own culture of lies worsens, we would do well to tackle the thorny issues surrounding a tough view of truth by grappling with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the twentieth century’s apostle of truth. He may seem to be too “passé” a celebrity to mesmerize us anymore, but his witness to us in the West is actually more telling than ever.

Solzhenitsyn’s love for the truth was strengthened in the Gulag—the Soviet labor camps in which he served an eight-year sentence. There he developed the ability and passion to strip away the rhetoric and pursue the truth, though at an exceedingly high cost.

We in the West do not presently face the Gulag or an empire of lies, but the truth is no less vital for living a free life. All those who would lead our society effectively would do well to engage with the life and witness of one who based his life on the truth.

To Bigotry No Sanction

George Washington & Religious Liberty

By Paul F. Boller, Jr.
Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald
(1997)

Discussion Guide Included.

Excerpts from George Washington and Religion. Most people don’t realize how powerfully and persuasively George Washington wrote on the subject of religious freedom and persecution, desiring “a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Doing Well and Doing Good

Money, Giving, and Caring in a Free Society

By Edited by Os Guinness with Ginger Koloszyc
(1997)

It might be said that never in the entire field of human need has so much been asked so often of so few. And at a time when more and more is being asked of the willing volunteer and the generous giver, public debate is strong on the nuts and bolts of philanthropy—especially taxes and laws—but weak on this unique Western tradition’s roots and great ideals, especially the decisive contribution of faith.

The readings in Doing Well and Doing Good are rich in insight and application and help us explore the questions that surround giving today.

What is the meaning of money? Of giving? Of voluntary associations? Of doing well and doing good? What are the most effective ways of giving that are not damaging to one’s heirs and cannot be sidetracked by foundation professionals after one’s death? The readings address these and similar topics. The curriculum also touches on many of the big questions in public life today—government downsizing, the renewal of voluntarism in a free society, the importance of “social capital” and “social entrepreneurialism,” and so on.

Doing Well and Doing Good is designed for those thinking through the issues of giving in their own lives as well as for those wishing to contribute constructively to today’s great debates on the issue.