As we sang Hark the Herald Angels Sing in church Sunday I (Lael) was again deeply moved by the glory and beauty of our God:

“Hail the Heaven Born Prince of Peace, Hail the Son of Righteousness!
Light and Life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings.”

I was also privileged to hear Handel’s Messiah last week, made more meaningful by re-reading Patrick Kavanaugh’s stirring devotional story of Handel’s inspiration in Faith and Culture. Tried to imagine the “Angels” section of Messiah suddenly exploding into the night sky to the shepherds’ shock.

If you’d like to share the Handel devo with a friend it’s posted on my blog at Bible.org. The music lovers on your Christmas list might enjoy Patrick’s book from which this was taken, The Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers. On the Tapestry home page you’ll find my top picks for other gift books and adventures in learning.

Enjoy the rest of the story of Frederick Larson’s devo on the night sky over Bethlehem at www.Bethlehemstar.net. I’ve always wondered why the wise men could see the star when Herod, his court and the rest of Judea seemed oblivious. Using NASA Star Maps and his legal skills, Rick ties together the clockwork movement of the stars, Matthew’s text, the star on a Roman coin and other clues to present compelling evidence for the story behind the star. He presents this story at churches across the nation and has produced a companion DVD.

Still looking for a gift for the learners on your list? A Faith and Culture Devotional might be much appreciated.

Kelly and I thank you again for your interest in our devotional and wish you Light and Life and Healing during this season and the year ahead.

Kelly and I edited and wrote A Faith and Culture Devotional to encourage one another to behold the glory of the Lord. Beholding really is transforming (2 Corinthians 3:18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” Note the connection between “beholding” and “transforming.”)

One way to “behold the glory of the Lord” is by reading A Faith and Culture Devotional together in a small group—enjoy discussing how others see God’s glory on display in creation, in great literature and art, and in history, especially the cross and resurrection–God at work all over the place, “marvelous in our eyes.” I visited a couple’s community group from Redeemer Church in Cinco Ranch (Houston) that is using selected devos as their springboard for bi-weekly discussion. Kelly writes on our Facebook page (A Faith and Culture Devotional group) about groups using it as a springboard for reflection at the Trinity Forum Academy and the Veritas Forum staff has used it for group discussion as well. The groups use the questions at the end of each devo or make up their own.

I’ve taken several small groups through the discussion guide you’ll find in the pdf file at the top of this blog—for women’s, men’s or mixed groups, even book groups. You are welcome to use it as is or to adapt for your own group needs. Some groups are discussing all the history and literature entries. Others the science entries. Others are letting each member of the group suggest a few favorites.

Here’s a Christmas gift suggestion: Give a student or a group leader a copy of Faith and Culture and print the study guide to tuck in.

A Faith and Culture devotional offers probing glimpses of the providential sweep of the history past and future. Of God’s deep design in creation. Of his beauty through the arts. “Beholding” restores our gratitude for the past, our hope for the future, our wonder for God in this moment. And may God change us in the process…one degree closer.

Amy shelves her conference binder alongside fifteen others, grateful for the weekend with top-tier Christian scholars and artists. She glances at the other binders and wonders, “Is this just another binder for my collection? Am I becoming a conference junkie? Why keep learning?”

Carl peruses the course requirements for his Master’s in counseling. He loves being a doctor and, nearing sixty, has no plans to change professions. He’s completed the “course or two” to sharpen his relational skills, but rather than feeling he has completed what he set out to do, he feels deeply drawn to more coursework…maybe even the degree…but why? How might this investment in education pay off over the diminishing years of his career and lifetime?

If I could share a cup of coffee with Amy or Carl I would challenge them…Why not keep learning? And investing in learning? Don’t just think about how your investment in education might pay off over the course of your lifetime, but think how it might pay off over the course of eternity. Everything we learn will go with us. (And hopefully we’ll remember it all much better with an imperishable brain.)

God runs a tight economy in his Kingdom. Nothing is ever wasted. Everything builds on everything else. The coursework, reading, sermons and Bible studies we apply ourselves to learn here can equip us for our eternal role in God’s Kingdom, paying eternal dividends. The people we help educate will take their education with them through eternity, blessing countless others.

It is true that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” We check our motives to see if we want to simply soak up more and more knowledge for the joy of enlarging ourselves. We make sure that our education is put into the loving service of building up others. But education can also be a path of worship.

“Jesus,” writes Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy (and A Faith and Culture Devotional) “is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived.…He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life.” As we learn more about him and what he has revealed and created, we become more fully alive. And “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another [2 Cor 3:18].

As Kelly and I have edited so many contributions about Jesus and how he is revealed in Bible and theology, history, philosophy, science, literature, art and contemporary culture, our wonder for him has grown. And hopefully, our capacities to understand and love what he loves and who he loves has grown as well. The more deeply we learn the more deeply we worship.

We are not learning for a lifetime, we are learning for eternity.

But the abandonment of Christianity has ultimately resulted in a loss of confidence that a unified curriculum could be based on knowledge of God or even shared moral values. The moral and spiritual wisdom of Plato, Aristotle, Moses, Solomon, and Jesus has, for the most part been excluded from the curriculum.

Some concerned faculty and citizens have led initiatives to restore teaching the foundations of democracy and the moral and spiritual wisdom of the ages into the curriculum. Their efforts have resulted in a number of beachheads such as The Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia, The Center for the Foundations of Free Societies at Cornell and Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. But World magazine reports that a similar program has been shut down at the University of Texas. The fledgling Center for Western Civilization and American Institutions was to have readings that included Plato and Aristotle but also selections from the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin; Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography but also Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, which tells of his move from faith in Marx to faith in Christ.

Although it was funded by outside sources the program met intense faculty opposition and has been renamed, restaffed and redirected. The dismissed founder of the program who still teaches his philosophy classes, professor Rob Koons, has finally broken his silence to explain what happened to the program in a post on the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy website:

“Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a ‘distribution’ standard–a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences. . . .

“The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.

“Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one’s salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one’s ow narrow research agenda. . . .

“Rather than admit this self-interest, liberal arts professors at UT use postmodern and multicultural ideas to defend the Uncurriculum. These fashionable ideas form an ‘ideology’ in Marx’s sense: a system of ideas designed to cloak, rationalize, and defend an unjust set of relationships, namely, the exploitation of undergraduates and their underwriters (parents, taxpayers, and donors). . . .

“Our program was a sound alternative to the Uncurriculum. It was privately funded and offered students a coherent way of satisfying many of their general education requirements. Unfortunately, the faculty saw our program as foreign and threatening, and therefore attacked it, much as the human body automatically attacks transplanted organs. We need to prevent that from happening in the future.

“One idea, which state legislators could implement, is the creation of charter colleges’ within existing state universities. The state could authorize groups of three or more professors, together with a private foundation or even a for-profit sponsor, to propose charters for innovative programs like ours. If its charter were approved by an outside board, a charter college would be authorized to offer specific courses to satisfy designated components of the state’s core, as well as certificates, minors, and majors. Faculty in the rest of the university would not control the decisions of the charter college.

“The experience of the Western Civilization and American Institutions program underscores a sad truth about higher education in America- it is mostly run by and for the faculty. What it likes and dislikes trumps what would be best for students. Our system will never fully achieve its promise as long as that remains true.”

(Congratulations to our book winner! Michelle Elford)

Today is the happy 6-year anniversary of my marriage to David — a “youngish” widower raising five great kids. Today is also the 1-year anniversary of my mother’s near-death, and gradual recovery to something like a stable condition in assisted living.

When I was engaged, a friend suggested that I reconsider the wisdom of marrying because the demands on the “sandwich generation” (those caring both for children and parents) would distract me from my larger cultural calling (the Veritas Forum, in particular). To credit my friend’s foresight, I really didn’t quite grasp what I was signing up for, either in marriage or in parenting. (I’m sure David didn’t, either). Nor did I request a crash course this year in geriatric endocrinology, cardiology and nephrology that help keep my mom closer to me on this side of heaven, while I was working, and while two of the children were finishing high school, one entering college, one marrying, and another giving birth. Nor, for that matter, do I remember ever signing up for any course, or life, of adulthood in any real form at all.

The truth is that I’m not much of a Giving Tree …

…but somehow I’m all caught up, entangled, entwined, and fed by the One Who is just that. Along the way I laid a few axes to the root, but thankfully the True Vine will be tenacious enough to eventually bear life in and through me.

The granularity of the Given Life not only takes our breath away (like off-road-wheelchairing today with my unwitting mom, as we rolled through a field and around the pond by our church), the Given Life also often feeds my “larger cultural calling.” When David and I moved Michelle into her freshman dorm last week, we were reminded of hundreds of thousands of students so loved by parents and by God. When, yesterday, my mom and I comforted a nurse’s aid — a lovely Indian woman who had lost her mother the day before — we were reminded of the pain of orphans, and the deep kindness of those like this woman who care for the elderly. When today we shared God’s love with Ruth — a partially-blind 96-year old who was upset with herself “for feeling uncheerful today” — we felt something of the love of God for a widow, and the dignity of this woman living so long, so bravely.

As we hold our grandsons, Nathaniel and Isaac, whether in a diaper meltdown or in a moment of bliss, we know more of God’s unconditional love for us, as well. His Fatherhood allows us to be children, still. He offers us His strength, his grace under pressure, his resourcefulness. My job is to learn to abide, and to first receive before presuming to give. (God is not the only one who prefers a cheerful giver.)

Eight years ago, I lived alone, in a pine cabin in the woods north of Boston, seven hundred miles from my Ohio home. Had I remained there, apart from some form of real community, I’m guessing my work would have become increasingly unhinged from the framework, and inspiration, of the real questions and longings of the heart … the joys and pains of love found and lost, and found again, forever, in Christ. So I offer thanks today, on this anniversary, for the Given Life. And to the Giver.

Millions of students are about to feel that familiar ache — summer is passing, another school year is beginning. SIgh.

Why DO we go to school? What MIGHT make it all worthwhile? Really?

In A Faith and Culture Devotional Dr. John Stott reminds us — our mind, and its training, is a powerful tool in the hands of God. The most powerful people in Scripture — such as Moses, Daniel and Paul — were highly educated. Even brilliant. Rooted in the ways of God, they also mastered the world’s teaching, and became wiser than their own teachers and leaders. In doing so, they changed the world.

Let Stott’s entry light a fire in our hearts and minds … and perhaps the heart and mind of a student in your life who would appreciate a hard copy of Stott’s words, of even a copy of A Faith and Culture Devotional, tucked in w/ a few other new supplies as they head back to classes and dorms.

[Stott’s devo is downloadable from the home page this week. [pdf icon to the left] Also, if you would like a copy of A Faith and Culture Devotional to give or enjoy, enter our drawing for a couple of free copies–one on August 31st and the second on September 7th. Enter by posting a comment here or on our Facebook page {A Faith and Culture Devotional} telling us either your favorite devo or the person you’d like to give the book to. {Yourself is ok} Let us know if you’d like the copy signed and to whom. You may enter two times.]

We received wonderful photos from Gordon College artist and professor Bruce Herman. These two triptychs, Miriam, Virgin Mother (Via Activa) and Second Adam (Via Contemplativa) have been permanently installed in a 13th century Benedictine monastery that Gordon College uses for its undergrad program and theology & art conference center. For greater detail of this beautiful work by Bruce please visit his the larger images on his website.

From a review of Miriam: Virgin Mother: “Bruce Herman investigates the life and experience of the Virgin Mary—one of the main subjects of traditional sacred art—but also one that has been scorned for the sentimental and often cloying depictions of the past three centuries. In his attempt to refresh this tradition, Herman has combined contemporary techniques, postmodern theory, and genuine faith in order to make images that are connected to the tradition, yet breaking new ground. Richly colored images and textured surfaces with nuanced symbolism in a contemporary voice, evoke the mysterious story of a virgin mother.”

A Faith and Culture Devotional is a treasure book of God’s glory from 70 believers who are, themselves, treasures. Dallas Willard, Walter Bradley, Dick Keyes, Frederica Matthewes-Green, Erwin McManus, Scot McKnight, Os Guinness, Bill Edgar, Bruce Herman, Catherine Claire Larson, John Eldredge …

They’re helping me see God’s glory as I learn about ancient empires, DNA, Tolkien & joy, flight, Rockwell, the search for intimacy, String theory, J.S. Bach, the Periodic Table, the fall of Rome, Quantum physics, Dylan, Dark matter, U2, Paradise Lost, T.S. Eliot, the genius of Jesus, the Great Awakenings and the Resurrection.

Somehow I’d missed that Rembrandt painted his Return of the Prodigal after losing five of his own children, and two wives. I didn’t know that missionaries (and the Gospel) so impressed Charles Darwin on his early voyage. Who knew that Oscar Wilde read Pascal’s Pensees while Wilde was in jail for “crimes of gross indecency” then came to Christ for mercy (thus he could write the end of Dorian Gray as an offer of salvation). I missed that Picasso was such a cad, though his tragic late-in-life confession does have the merit of sincerity.

Faith and culture? Why bother? In one day a tsunami, or band of terrorists, can devastate decades of culture-making. Including countless human lives. Some of us are in slight shock, if not in mourning….

… 2008 was and 2009 may be, for many, years to suggest that life on earth, in this old order, holds no guarantees. There is the tanking economy. There are culturally-savvy billionaire(s) and their creative reframing of policies of death in vaguely spiritual and otherwise acceptable language. (A strong opinion, though sufficiently vague wording, I hope). But, truly, anything can and does happen in this world.

Things can, and do, fall apart. On a personal level: I left for an overnight hiking trip last summer and came home to find my mother (my best lifelong friend) unconscious in a hospital I.C.U. for eight days. (After weeks in the hospital, she miraculously survived, but I’m struck by the inevitable loss of her, some day.) Three other friends died in their 50s.

I’ve realized that our time here is short. I need to wake up. Soon. Now. To love and feel, think and act, well. It helps a bit to have some treasures of many books in one book.

Chesterton felt that the whole earth, after the Fall, because of the Fall, was something of an epic shipwreck. And that anything good was the result of painstaking redemption, like hauling up silverware and heirlooms from the bottom of the ocean. So it is with culture-making – hard, and because of love. (Chesterton also believed that “Satan fell from the force of gravity.” So perhaps I should lighten up.)

Faith and culture? Yeah. From Genesis onward, including an epic flood, faith has inspired believers to take the raw material of God’s creation and create culture (or as Andy Crouch likes to say, instances of culture) — to build in the ruins, to farm, to study, to dance, to paint, to sing, to write books, to love and nurture new life, to drill wells for fresh water, to visit prisoners with hope, to find cures for disease. Faith sees “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” and, in response, worships and creates.

Reminders, inklings, and actual knowledge of the glory of God, his beauty and genius, builds my faith in the otherwise “impossible.” On a good day, I begin to look at ruins, despair, chaos in new ways. I admire New York artist Mako Fujimura when overlooking the devastation on September 12, 2001 (as discussed in the last week of FCD). I wonder along with him, wow, this is really bad, but what might God have in mind and heart here? What is the path of redemption? How does faith in a risen savior create beauty and life, again, in culture(s)?

So, our A Faith and Culture Devotional offers daily reminders of the Redeemer’s work in the world He loves. Hand to the plow.

In his op-ed piece, “Lessons from Michael Jackson,” Faith and Culture Devotional contributor Mark Joseph invites us to step back from both the man and his work and remind ourselves of our values. Mark is a music producer (The Passion of the Christ rock CD) editor of entertainment and culture news Bullypulpit.com, and author of Faith, God & Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Two more lessons from Michael Jackson: Like many of us over forty, Michael Jackson, with his modern penchant for hyper-performance, spectacle, and artifice connected less and less with a new generation that values just the opposite. (See F&CD p.276 “The Purpose of History”). As many postmoderns lose confidence in discovering revealed or objective Truth they see the big shiny machine of progress and don’t believe it any more. Rather than seeing progress they see only motion. People who live with integrity and humanity provide a small but trustworthy point of reference in the shifting sands.

It’s the same lesson that UnChristian author and Barna Group president David Kinnaman urged our listeners to consider when we pre-recorded a Things that Matter Most interview with him this week on what a new generation really thinks about Christians. The research shows that today’s 16-29 year olds have an aversion to artifice, masks and hypocrisy. They long for authenticity and transparency. Outsiders respect Christians who acknowledge their insecurities and failings and who don’t pretend (see F&CD John Eldredge’s “Major and Minor Themes” p. 151) that following Jesus is all happy-clappy and “Victory in Jesus.”

On January 11,1992, in a telling snapshot of this cultural shift from artifice to authenticity, Jackson’s album Dangerous was displaced from its number one spot atop the charts by Nirvana’s Nevermind. To many in the younger generation Jackson’s cover art on the modern, lushly produced successor to Thriller and Bad attained new heights of artifice, featuring Jackson’s eyes peering out from behind the Sargent Pepperesque artwork, as if the entire album cover were another of the masks of which Michael was so fond.

The cover art of the more postmodern Nevermind evoked the antithesis of Jackson’s Neverland world of pretence and grandiose self-reference, over-production and over-the-top videos. The iconic Jackson cover was toppled by the ironic Nirvana cover—the bright-eyed water baby swimming for the lure of the buck, a not so subtle rejection of the fame and success Jackson relentlessly pursued. The deeply hopeful master of a modern utopian universe gave way to a garage band from Seattle who took their postmodern nihilism straight up.

Stripped down and raw, Nirvana’s music and videos helped reset the button of cultural relevance. Rolling Stone magazine celebrated the band’s “brutal roar and soothing melodies,” the “cryptic beauty of Cobain’s lyrics and the howling intimacy of his singing.” “We are the world/we are the children/we are the ones to make a brighter day so let’s start giving” was written on a different planet, in a different age than “Here we are now/Entertain us/I feel stupid and contagious/I’m worse at what I do best/And for this gift I feel blessed/Our little group has always been/And always will until the end.” The younger generation still enjoys partying with Michael’s grooves, but their unfulfilled longings for a North Star and real hope still ripple through music (and politics).

As it turned out, Jackson’s attempts to manage the physical demands of one last run at meaning and purpose in megasuccess may have been just as deadly as Cobain’s despair of finding it there (or anywhere else).

Lesson number two from Jackson’s memorial service and UnChristian. Kinnaman’s research also showed that young people are weary of Christians’ judgmental, condemning ways. They long to see followers of Jesus Christ reflect his grace. So, as I ponder how some of Michael’s lyrics are in conflict w/ Christian values, how he really never “got it” that having kids sleep in his bed was “Dangerous,” even the stories of his drug abuse and possible injury to children, I take caution to not fall in step with either the idol worship of the fans or the snotty, judgmentalism of the tabloid press.

Before I condemn him for his artifice, his naïve utopianism or his attempt to live in a fantasy land of his own making, I wonder what I would do if I couldn’t go to a movie or a bookstore without things grinding to a halt, crowds pressing in for a look-see or an autograph. I wonder, if I could rarely go out to play as a child or hang w/ acquaintances or associates who didn’t want a piece of me as an adult, if I might cherish the company of animals and children. If I had a pile of money and couldn’t leave the ranch, what would I have built? (Something with a book store, coffee shop and literary lights?)

This Jackson quote from Mark Joseph’s post last week at bullypulpit.com has haunted me:
“I am going to say something I have never said before and this is the truth. I have no reason to lie to you and God knows I am telling the truth. I think all my success and fame, and I have wanted it, I have wanted it because I wanted to be loved. That’s all. That’s the real truth. I wanted people to love me, truly love me, because I never really felt loved. I said I know I have an ability. Maybe if I sharpened my craft, maybe people will love me more. I just wanted to be loved because I think it is very important to be loved and to tell people that you love them and to look in their eyes and say it.”

Many Christians were moved by the closing prayer of Pastor Lucious Smith at Michael’s memorial. A call to responsibility to God and others, yet full of grace, I think the outsiders quoted in UnChristian may have appreciated it as well:

“Our Heavenly Father, we thank you this day for the memory of Michael Jackson that means so much to us, even right now. Thank you for the gift of music he gave us. Thank you for the man that he was and what he sought to do with his life. We pray that you would remind us that we truly can make a difference if we make up our minds to do so. Help us to take a message of love and peace and healing with us as we go. Let us demonstrate that love when we go to school. Let us demonstrate that love when we go to work. Let us demonstrate that love as we walk the streets of our city, and let us no longer turn a blind eye to the needs that we walk by every day. Let us stop judging people by the color of their skin and the accent of their voice. Let us rather look in the heart of every man, woman, boy and girl and try to reach them with the love that Michael Jackson showed us in his music.

“But even now the King of Pop must bow his knee to the King of Kings. And we pray that you would remind us Lord, that our lives are but dust. We are here for a moment and then we are gone. Thank you, Lord, for how Michael impacted us and how we might impact others. For we pray that this moment will not be forgotten as an event to have been enjoyed but as a reminder that we too can make a change. Bless us and keep us with the love by which you kept Michael. And we offer this prayer in the glorious name of Jesus our Lord, that all who agree say…Amen.”

Lael: If having knowledge of God is so vital for human flourishing, why do you think God didn’t give us more knowledge—more archeological evidence for the ark or the exodus, earlier manuscripts of the Bible, individual visions or dreams …some silver bullets of evidence that would give us the undeniable knowledge we need to trust him? As you said earlier, communication is as much about what you make known as what you withhold. Why do you think God withholds so much if knowledge is so important as the basis of faith?

(Dallas) Knowledge is also dangerous. And you have to grow into it in a way that makes it safe for you. You can illustrate that by technological knowledge. We have a problem with terrorism today precisely because of the advances in technology. People have been blowing themselves up to kill others for a long time, but we did not have a problem with international terrorism.

Our problem with knowledge today is that we already know more than we know what to do with. And with reference to God, he has adjusted the reality of himself to beings that he wants to choose and seek him…as a part of development that allows them to receive him and live as he would like them to live in their increasing knowledge of God…

The issue is not just, “May I have more knowledge?” or “Should we have more knowledge?”, but “What did I do with the knowledge I had?” If we use that knowledge, we will be safely led into all of the knowledge of God that we need. And I think that you have to understand that in order to understand why the Bible is in the situation it is in, why the church is like it is, why history has been the way it is. That is often a dreadful thing, but I believe that it is a part of God’s technique to adjusting himself to what we are capable of as human beings.

Lael: Because we all know people who are “educated far beyond their intelligence” as we like to say, far beyond their character to be able to handle their knowledge…

Dallas: This is tied to what Paul says about how “knowledge puffs up…Love builds up.” And “if anyone thinks they know anything, yet,” Paul said, “they do not know it as they ought to know.” Knowledge has effects on our character that are only safe as we grow in love.

That means that it [knowledge] will not run over us.

And we want to remember that knowledge is like that in all of its dimensions. It’s not just knowledge of God. Knowledge does not run over you. And we have a school system now that basically presents knowledge as something [where] you come, and sit in this room, and it will run over you. And it doesn’t. And that’s why we have such massive failures, because we are not approaching it from the attitude of, Knowledge is for people who seek it and want it.

Lael: And for people who can “handle the truth” as Jack Nicholson would say, in humility. In a way that doesn’t puff us up and destroy us like maybe it did for some of the Harvard students that we mentioned in the Grant study starting out, but in a way that leads to peace and joy.

Dallas: You can be absolutely sure that that is a major part of what was going on there. And it’s a pity that the study is not able to deal with that.