I've been reading a fairly excellent book recently (stolen again from Pat Hastings - sorry, I'll give it back soon). Mark Noll from Wheaton College wrote "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" quite a while back, and it's been an influential work on the history and current state of the minds of American evangelicals. Think of it as a commentary on the development of the mental habits American evangelical Christians often exhibit.
The book is (so far) largely a constructive criticism towards habits common to evangelicals (for example, individualism, populism, preaching for an emotional response, urgency of action over thought and deliberation, etc), but so far the real strength of the book has been documenting how these habits came about, and in fact, how these tendencies saved Christianity in America at different times in this nations history (though many became weaknesses over time). Two particularly interesting notes are how the separation of church and state may have ultimately led to the "consumer church" culture, and how the Conservative Right became identified (and disliked) so closely with evangelical Christians.
Reading the history of how the evangelical movement developed is like seeing the Ecclesiastical quote "there is nothing new under the sun" being fleshed out with old examples that parallel modern-day church/sect movements. I'm only at the start of the second section, page 72, but it's been a very rewarding read so far.
Hope everyone had a good thanksgiving =)
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5 comments:
Wow. Jesse, you're too smart for me =p. I'm just an evangelical . . .
hey. i never claimed
1) to be smarter than evangelicals
2) that all evangelicals are dumb.
however, if you want, I can make an exception for you =P. except you're smarter than I am and think wayyy too much anyways.
the main point of the book is more about how the evangelical mind (the general population of evangelicals thinking about different subjects) isn't very collectively organized, per se, so that it allows for some very bad thinking within its confines.
it's kind of like when you teach math fairly loosely - even though you might not be teaching anything wrong, the non-rigorous approach can lead to bad assumptions in the minds of students (like sloppy work with limits or subtracting infinities from each other or something like that).
thumbs up on the title. :)
Hope you had a great thanksgiving too! I was in Houston, where it was beautiful! I loved escaping the ice box :/ (my pet name for Cornell)
That's an interesting post. I've had several mathematicians want things to be more defined.
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