Caveat Emptor

Short post today, as classes start tomorrow.

Not that I've been procrastinating on class planning--most of my courses are prepped and ready to go. In fact, I thought initially that I could devote this evening to doing some reading for my book proposal. See, I got a religion book whose review I had read and appreciated in the Christian Century from waaaay back in 2008.

The book's author spoke of how faith in the present was changing. No longer could religion--Christianity in particular--assume that it held an assumed position of importance in life and culture. Now Christianity, and indeed faith in general, has become one option among many others. One can be non-Christian today and not be arrested or shunned as a heretic (generally, of course--I'd not want to declare myself atheist in certain back-woods small Oklahoma towns, for instance).

This book, I thought, is just what I need to frame my investigation into twenty-first century evangelical outreach. Part of the sea-change in evangelical techniques (so goes my thinking) involves the shocking realization among evangelicals that the preeminence of the gospel isn't simply The Way Things Are In The West.

The rise of worldview analysis (i.e., identifying and taxonomizing non-Christian systems as all-encompassing, wholly different ways of viewing the world) exemplifies this realization. Rather than dividing the human world into two groups (the "One True Way" and "lies"), worldview evangelism recognizes whole grids and tables of different value lenses. Moreover, it situates "the Biblical Christian worldview" on that same table. To be sure, worldview evangelists believe that the Christian view is in fact the correct one, but (I would argue) the modification from duality (true/false) to grid/table isn't just cosmetic.

So--I needed this book. The trouble is, I had difficulty recalling the name and author; I could only remember the subject. With my Christmas gift of a Barnes and Noble card, I purchased what I thought was the book. Cracking it open for the first time this evening, though, I realized that I had in my hands a book sort of like but not quite the book I needed. had the unfortunate experience of realizing I'd bought the wrong book.

I bought The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox. After some reading and finally some long searching through Christian Century archives, I figured out that the book I actually wanted was A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.

By then, of course, I'd wasted much of my evening. I'll get the Taylor from the library tomorrow. Ah, well. It's not as if I could have read it all anyway. The Cox (which is fine on its own) is a doable-in-a-few-days 200 pages or so. Taylor is almost 900 pages.

Caveat emptor--or should I say, caveat lector.

More tomorrow,

JF