By Lael Arrington

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.

By Lael Arrington

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.

In A Faith and Culture Devotional Dr. J.P. Moreland describes how Harvard professor Julie Reuben (The Making of the Modern University) has chronicled the drift in teaching knowledge and values in our Universities: “From 1880-1910, colleges took themselves to have two mandates: the impartation of wisdom and knowledge and the tools needed to discover them, and the development of spiritually, morally and politically virtuous graduates who could serve God, the state, and the church well….”

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.”

by Kelly Monroe Kullberg

(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.

by Kelly Monroe Kullberg

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.]