The Language of God
A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
By Francis S. Collins
(The Free Press, 2006)
A personal account of Collins’s faith and experiences as a genetics researcher, plus discussions of more general topics of science and faith.
paper, 294 pages, includes discussion guide.
Category: Books by the Fellows
Politics, Morality, and Civility
By Václav Havel
Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald
(2006)Discussion Guide Included
An essay by Czech playwright and former President Václav Havel.
“Politics, Morality & Civility” is from his 1992 book Summer Meditations, written soon after the former dissident took office after the dramatic fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia. It is a clear look at the world situation and a call for our cultures and our leaders to rediscover or cultivate what Havel terms “higher responsibility,” a morally grounded vision for the common good.
In his Foreword, Alonzo McDonald says that the essay “summarizes Havel’s thinking on how a modern politician should think and act. In this commentary, he acknowledges that the transition to democracy has also brought a ‘dazzling explosion of every imaginable human vice’ and that ‘society has freed itself, true, but in some ways it behaves worse than when it was in chains.’ Naturally these tendencies enormously complicate the challenge, which he still accepts, to administer the state morally, justly, and with truth.” Yet Havel still believes that high moral standards, respect for the transcendent, and truth in action can yet be applied in our complex, modern, democratic societies.
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Hannah and Nathan
By Wendell Berry
Foreword by Gregory Wolfe
(2006)Discussion Guide Included
This Reading is an excerpt from Wendell Berry’s 2004 novel, Hannah Coulter with a Foreword by Gregory Wolfe, editor of the journal Image and director of the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.
Hannah Coulter, the latest novel set in Berry’s fictional Port William, Kentucky, is something of a sequel to Berry’s first novel, Nathan Coulter (1960, revised 1985). In our selection, which reads more like a memoir than a traditional novel, Hannah narrates the events surrounding her courtship and marriage with Nathan after the death of her first husband in World War II. In the process, she welcomes the reader into a way of life different from our own, and into a vision for what a human life can be.
As Wolfe notes in his Foreword, the story reminds us that “Love is not a passing emotion but a fundamental commitment, a rootedness in being; its shape and meaning can only be known on the scale of a lifetime.” There is a public dimension to marriage, and Hannah’s story raises quiet but insistent questions for us who may have forgotten our own history. Wolfe asks with Berry and Hannah: What have we lost as we have made marriage into an abstract, private pact, forgetting its appropriate setting in the web of obligations that holds together a community?
Touching on life and love, loss and grief—and recovery, commitment and consequence, place and continuity, “Hannah & Nathan” will introduce you to characters you will want to spend time with—and a place you will want to revisit.
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The White Mare
By Michael McLaverty
Foreword by Miguel Mesquita da Cunha
(2006)Discussion Guide Included
This Reading features a short story by the northern Irish writer Michael McLaverty. McLaverty takes us to a seemingly remote island in a seemingly remote time. But his careful attention to the small details of this account of a few days in the life of an elderly farmer plowing his field reveals something profound about the human condition and the beauty and struggles of the world we inhabit.
We are introduced anew to some universal themes—including work and our relation to it, beauty and suffering, and the transitions of life—and permitted to live deeper within the question of what it all means. The selection is also a good introduction to the transparent yet evocative prose of an under-appreciated twentieth-century master of the short story.
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Children of Prometheus
Technology and the Good Life
By Edited by Dan Russ with Peter Edman
(2006)
Technology has become too important to be left to technologists. As its changes keep increasing in both rate and scope, leaders of all spheres and levels of society need a critical and constructive view of technology. Such a view is best developed by grounding our understanding in the origins of the technological ideal and considering the ways technology has developed or diverged from its ideals over the course of history, as well as the way technological ideals relate to wider human concepts of the good life.
Children of Prometheus offers a series of readings, ancient and contemporary, that raise the seminal and enduring questions about the extraordinary advancements that many technologies have given the world; the origins of technology; the triumph of technique over substance in the modern world; the benefits we are now enjoying and the prices we are now paying; and our hopes, dreams, and plans for a rehumanized technology. In short, we join a dialogue among some of the great thinkers about what it means for humans to have technological dominion over creation, what we are making of that creation, and what we are making of ourselves.
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Here I Am
Now What on Earth Should I Be Doing?
By Quentin Schultze
(Baker Books, 2005)
Struggling to discern God’s call is not uncommon. Many people wrestle with understanding what God has planned for them. Here I Am solves part of the mystery by distinguishing between one’s shared vocation and particular life stations. Stations include jobs, situations, and relationships, and they change often. But vocation, for Christians especially, remains the same—to apply faith as caretakers of God’s world. Here I Am explains how to be caring followers of Jesus in every station of life. It offers practical ways to strive for excellence, celebrate leisure, nurture community, and cultivate a legacy. This book is for students, those seeking satisfaction in their work, and anyone seeking a renewed sense of God’s call. They will discover how to care about and for the world, participating in God’s renewal of all things.
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Charles Colson
A Life Redeemed
An engaging account of the life of Watergate figure and Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson.By Jonathan Aitken
(Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005)
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Jonathan Edwards at 300
Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth
This collection of essays represents much of the best and most recent work being done on Edwards and reflect the wide diversity of approaches to his life, thought, and legacy.By Harry S. Stout, Kenneth Minkema and Caleb Maskell, eds.
(University Press of America, 2005)
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Is the Reformation Over?
An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism
An evaluation of contemporary Roman Catholicism and the changing relationship between Catholics and evangelicals.By Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom
(Baker Academic, 2005)
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America’s God
From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln
A definitive history of Christian theology in America from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.By Mark A. Noll
(Oxford University Press, 2005)
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Rallying The Really Human Things
Moral Imagination In Politics, Literature, and Everyday Life
Vigen Guroian applies a theologian's eye to the works of Burke, Russell Kirk, G. K. Chesterton, Flannery O'Connor, St. John Chrysostom, and other exemplars of the religious humanist tradition to diagnose our cultural crisis and points the way towards a culture more solicitous of the "really human things."By Vigen Guroian
(Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005)
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Religion and Politics in America
A Conversation
A series of essays for policy makers and enthusiasts designed to aid their understanding of how religion informs politics.By Michael Cromartie
(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005)
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Religion, Culture, and International Conflict
A Conversation
This timely and important book presents a series of conversations steeped in a diversity of viewpoints about the nature, role, and impact of religiously grounded moral arguments.By Michael Cromartie
(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005)
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Not Just Science
Questions Where Christian Faith and Natural Science Intersect
A look at the questions students should be asking as they study the natural sciences in relation to the Christian worldview and think critically about God's creation.By E. David Cook
(Zondervan, 2005)
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Unspeakable
Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror
By Os Guinness
(HarperOne, 2005)
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