Steven Garber writes ("Fabric of Faithfulness, p. 22):

"What do you love?" It is in that question and the spiritual dynamics implicit in its answer that belief and behavior are woven together.

So here, incomplete, unprioritized, and without adequate explanation, is a list of ...

Some of the things I love, in a pseudo-alphabetical order:

Abraham Kuyper.
Abraham Lincoln.
Bach’s music, especially when performed on the piano.
Blundstone boots.
Books & Culture magazine.
Cafés.
Calvin Seerveld and his work.
Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, both the book and the very idea of it.
City Journal.
CLAC.
Coffee.
Commentary magazine.
D. Th. Vollenhoven’s work on philosophy and the history of philosophy.
Denim, wool and corduroy.
E-mail (instead of phone calls).
First Things magazine.
Genesis 1:1–2:3.
Good craftwork, in every area of life.
Good design, in every area of life.
Good food and good conversation, combined.
Herman Dooyeweerd’s work on philosophy, and his more popular writings.
Hiking through forests in fall and spring.
Imagination.
Isaiah 60.
Jane Austen’s finished novels.
Job 38–39.
John Calvin.
Justice.
Legal thrillers, especially those of Scott Turow.
Maps of places in which I am travelling.
My daughters.
My wife.
Mystery novels, especially those of P. D. James.
Neocalvinism.
Our World Belongs to God, a contemporary confession.
People who read the great books with respect and attention.
Prayer books, but especially the daily prayer version of the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship.
Proverbs 1–9.
Psalm 119: 18.
Psalm 19.
Reading anything, even the back of cereal boxes.
Reading carefully.
Reading for fun.
Reading to learn.
Rembrandt's paintings, drawings, and etches.
Revelation 21.
Romans 8.
Schubert’s music, especially Death and the maiden (String Quartet No. 14 in D minor).
Shakespeare’s plays.
Shorter poems.
Solitude.
Stabilo Sensor pens.
Tales of espionage, especially those of Alan Furst.
The church year, but especially Advent, as our family celebrates it.
The colours of woods, spices, and stones.
The fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, in Europe.
The Heidelberg Catechism.
The King of kings.
The Netherlands, every carefully cultivated square inch of it. But especially the Rijksmuseum.
The New Urbanism.
The New York Intellectuals of the 20th century.
The resistance against the Nazis, in all its forms.
The Victorian Age.
Travelling to cities with great downtowns (i.e. bookstores, cafés, plazas and boulevards).
Turtlenecks.
Vancouver, BC, especially the view towards downtown from the Point Grey Beaches at dusk, with incoming float planes.
Vermeer’s paintings.
Winston Churchill.

Why do I get up in the morning?

Andrew Careaga writes: Great question. Today, I got out of bed from a sense of obligation -- work duties that for some reason require my presence. To wit: a telephone conference call at 8 a.m. (in 21 minutes) and an Academic Council meeting at 1:30 p.m. If I'd had my 'druthers, I would've stayed in bed this morning. Scratchy throat from too much singing and teaching last night. After 17 years in a charismatic/pentecostal church, I have yet to perfect the shouting and bellowing, and during praise and worship last night, I did a bit of both, and then did some more singing and yelling during youth group meeting afterwards. My throat is sore this morning. And it's raining. A good day to stay home and read. But I'm here instead.

(I cannot get Andrew's links to work properly. The entry is at Thursday, September 19, 2002.

I have just begun reading David Naugle's Worldview: The History of a Concept, which may well have been part of the required reading for our formal seminar if I paid attention to it earlier.


Also looking interesting: Cornelius Plantinga's Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living.

Dave Hegeman has an interesting Christian worldview blog. He is the author of Plowing In Hope: Toward a Biblical Theology of Culture.

Mieko and Shin: Emeth Hesed Smith blogs from Tokyo.

Steven Garber asks (p. 111)

How is it possible, under the impact of modern consciousness, for young adults in this century to hear Qoheleth's admonition, as Ellul interprets him for us: "You must take sides earlier - when you can actually make choices, when you have many paths opening at your feet, before the weight of necessity overwhelms you." Our answers to the cosmic questions - beliefs about God, human nature, history - form the pretheoretical framework for how we understand and interpret the world around us. With them and from them we make sense of what we see and hear. As a constellation of cares and commitments, they become a tapestry which connects the disparate strands of our lives. Because this is true for every person under the sun, we can understand Iris Murdoch's assertion that "at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over."


Belief and behavior are braided in the very deepest places of the human heart. Qoheleth's warning takes on its own urgency in a time in human history when, as Basil Mitchell noted about modernity's effects on young people, "the very conditions which create the need for meaning also make it extremely difficult to meet it."

In his research for The Fabric of Faithfulness, Steven Garber did a great many interviews. He continues from the passage quoted above by noting that

As those interviewed answered questions about how they make sense of life and the world, two factors stood out: their desire for coherence and their belief in truth. No other issues seemed as central to their articulation of their worldviews as these two; together they are woven into the fabric of faith of those who believe and who act on what they believe.

On my own journey this "desire for coherence and belief in truth" has been a significant part of the quest. I am not now and have never been a postmodernist (my delusions and temptations tend more anachronistically toward the Socratic or Victorian), and I seldom suffer doubt about the very possibility of truth. But what might the truth be? In my very early teens this was a question at the most basic level; as of 1982 it has been more a matter of trying to connect what else I might know of the world to the basic truth that God is. The desire for real-life, everyday coherence - in my case on the one hand a desperate desire to connect my political and social activism with my belief in God, and on the other hand the pretty common but extra-ordinarily difficult effort to balance work and family - has caused me far more agony than the question of truth.

Since we are reading Steven Garber at the moment, here are three links to some of his short writings available on the web:



"Learning from Tolkien about life: The Lord of the Rings revisited."

Garber columns at boundless.org

"Substantial healing, one more time." (Beginning at page 8 of the linked pdf magazine.)

Steven Garber writes (The Fabric of Faithfulness, pp. 37-38) that

... understanding those who have kept faith over the years -- who with substantial integrity have connected belief to behavior, personally as well as publically -- requires the weaving together of ... three strands: convictions, character and community. In the tapestrylike stories of the experiences of those interviewed, these three factors were the major influences, as seen retrospectively, on the construction of their respective visions of what is real and true and right ...

Garber elaborates on each of these strands:

Convictions: They were taught a worldview which was sufficient for the questions and crises of the next twenty years, particularly the challenge of modern consciousness with its implicit secularization and pluralization.


Character: They met a teacher who incarnated the worldview which they were coming to consciously identify as their own, and in and through that relationship they saw that it was possible to reside within that worldview themselves.


Community: They made choices over the years to live out their worldview in the company of mutually committed folk who provided a network of stimulation and support which showed that the ideas could be coherent across the whole of life.


Woven together, convictions, character and community nourish a vision of moral meaning which can stand against the most destructive forces of modern consciousness.

My worldview has been shaped most deeply by my reading -- but my reading straining at the contexts in which I find myself. My cataclysmic conversion in 1982 to the Christian faith was precipitated by a reading of the New Testament of the Bible in the Good News paraphrase. In the years that followed I struggled to figure out the relationship between that ur-commitment and my other commitments -- particularly my political commitments. My reading first took me in the direction of John Howard Yoder and Ron Sider. But I had also been reading Bob Goudzwaard and the Schaeffers. In 1989 I decided to read my way through the neocalvinist tradition, starting with its roots in Augustine and Calvin, and continuing through Groen Van Prinsterer and Abraham Kuyper to Herman Dooyeweerd. It is probably in that year and through that reading that my convictions settled into the patterns to which they still incline -- in broadest outline, a conviction that everything begins with God, a conviction that things are wildly messed up, and a conviction that there is a fix for it all ... in the tears and hands of God.



The mentors who helped shape my character are many, and their influences on me are complex, but as I write this two people come to mind most vividly. Anthony Perry was an Anglo-Catholic monk who ran a retreat centre at a rural monastery in the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa. He was someone who managed to balance staunch principle with generous compassion, and the only person within a day's drive of our hometown who would host a multi-racial youth retreat in the early 1980s. His counsel and example meant much to me then, and his life still serves as a benchmark for me now ... non-monk though I be! Cal Seerveld has been a model especially in the way that he connects his reading of Scripture with his scholarship, and brings both to bear on his life in this world. No book I own is more threadbare from reading than Cal's Rainbows for a Fallen World, but more influential on who I am than Cal's published books has been his lecture notes and handouts -- evidences of the process of his work -- that arrive regularly in his distinctive stamp-encrusted recycled envelopes.



Community is more tricky -- even painful -- to trace. I have deep friendships that stretch back to the early 1980s, but they are strained by the great divide resulting from migrating from one continent to another. Beginning in 1982 in South Africa, Angela and I had a small group of friends, an intersection of Youth For Christ, church, youth symphony orchestra, school and university, that served as an intense context for thinking about God, politics, everything, and that later morphed into our friendship with the decade-older Brian and Ann Sweetlove and their friends. Also in the early 1980s, we became friends with Mark Manley, who organised the annual (Christian) Valley Arts Festival, and who became a close political comrade, which led to another group of friends and the short-lived Public Justice Movement. Early in the 1990s, we met Craig Bartholomew, and the group of people who became the Christian Worldview Network. And in 1994 we started "the Wednesday group" in our home, two handfuls of graduate students and young professionals struggling with faith, people like Frank Mueller, who became some of our closest friends. But now all these friendships are a loose skein around the earth, with some of us in Europe, some in North America, a few in Asia, and many still in Africa.



I wonder what this scattering of our friendships around the globe means for the way in which I connect my faith and my everyday life? Certainly, it complicates what I learn from Steven Garber, who quotes (p. 149) a friend of his, Bob Kramer, as saying that he is

... more and more convinced that the people you choose to have around you have more to do with how you act upon what you believe than what you read or the ideas that influence you. The influence of ideas has to be there, but the application is something it's very hard to work out by yourself. You work it out in the context of friends -- just as you work it out with your spouse, so you work it out with a group of friends.