Over the past couple of years, I have met with people who’ve asked me to reconsider the subcultural training of my youth in what I see as an attempt to keep me in the fold or bring me back in, depending on their views.

I met my wife at a summer church camp when we were 12, we married in her hometown church when we were 24 and, 26+ years later, we’re still married so I haven’t cut ties from my childhood subculture in any hard, abrupt, total sense.

Over the New Year’s Day extended holiday weekend, a good friend, medical doctor by trade, who with colleagues bought a primary school for a church congregation that has expanded from a few people to over 2000 since 2009, loaned me the following books to read:

• How Should We Then Live? (L’Abri 50th Anniversary Edition): The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, by Francis A. Schaeffer (Author), Lane T. Dennis (Foreword)
• How Now Shall We Live?, by Charles Colson (Author), Nancy Pearcey (Author), Harold Fickett (Collaborator)

Before I read them, I shall provide for myself and the reader a snippet of a review of each book.

• The first: “Finally, Schaeffer names well, twenty-five years before such things unfolded in Washington, just how societies without a sense of what the political means, would respond to terrorism.  Such societies, Schaeffer writes, because they do not have any sense of liberty as a genuine political good, will “give up liberties” and welcome “a manipulating authoritarian government” (248) when decades of comfort get disturbed and the government promises to destroy evil (a strange promise for a government to make, as I tried to say even back in the last decade, but then again, it was the folks who recommended Schaeffer who seemed most convinced that a government could do just that).”
• The second: “For Catholics—as well as for Protestants who have kept up contact with their Catholic past—natural law has been the principal vehicle for reflection upon general revelation. Though [John] Calvin accepted the natural law, he did not make much of it—for fear, perhaps, of obscuring the depravity of the mind. Among most of his heirs, the tradition has languished. Some even oppose it as a de facto denial of the fall, a neo–Scholastic treason more in debt to Aristotle than to Jesus Christ. I believe that this is a misunderstanding, and the Colson and Pearcey project would have been impoverished had it enjoyed no access to this great river of thought. [C.S.] Lewis—who, like the authors, only rarely refers to natural law by its proper name—is in many ways its ideal missionary, not only for laypeople who have never heard of it and for scholars leery of its Scholastic form, but also for specialists who have forgotten its roots in common sense. The authors have drunk deeply from his well.”

For recent Christmas gifts, I received two other books:

• How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill
• How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It, by Arthur Herman

I contemplate my individual future, compare it to our species’ future, determine where we share goals and plot a true course that benefits us both.