Book Alert: Your Mind Matters

One of the programming changes at P&P is to mention some new book releases that I think are important reads. Unfortunately, many bookstores don’t agree with me, and more than likely you will not find these on the front shelves either. Therefore, I want to put them on the front shelf of my blog so to speak and encourage you to consider them as future reads. Author: John R. W. Stott Foreword: Mark A. Noll Publisher: InterVarsity Press Publishing Date: November 2006 Pages: 93 ISBN: 0-8308-3408-7 Retail Price: $7.00

“The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century Church. One cannot characterize it without having recourse to language which will sound hysterical and melodramatic. There is no longer a Christian mind. Three is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality. . . . But as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization.” - John Stott, quoting Henry Blamires, The Christian Mind

Over the recent month, the topic of anti-intellectualism has been brought up several times on P&P. I mentioned some resources for anti-intellectualism, not the least of which was a booklet by John Stott. In 1972, Dr. he gave his presidential address at the InterVarsity Fellowship Annual Conference called “Your Mind Matters.” A year later, InterVarsity published the address in a booklet under the same name. I am happy to see that last month, InterVarsity came out with a second edition of this book which I am recommending to you. The book can easily be read in one sitting, and the chapters are divided as follows: 1. Mindless Christianity 2. Why Use Our Minds 3. The Mind in the Christian Life 4. Acting on Our Knowledge Mark Noll, author of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, has written a foreward to the 2nd edition in which he says,

“In the twenty-first century, this biblically based message is every bit as relevant to the circumstances of church and society as it was a generation ago. If anything, the pressures against using the mind carefully, honestly and faithfully as an essential aspect of the Christian’s calling are stronger now than ever before. Most Christian communities, even those that once prided themselves on separation from the world, now participate eagerly in different forms of popular culture. The gains in that move have been to end the artificial segregation of the sacred from the secular and to give Christian values a chance at baptizing television, radio, cinema, contemporary music, the Internet, and the iPod. The danger has been capitulation to the sentimentalism, the raw emotionalism, the reliance on cliché and the impatience with sustained reasoning that prevails so powerfully in the world of pop. . . . In a world where pop culture and political strife have joined residual religious reasons for turning aside from responsible intellectual effort, the biblical message that ‘your mind matters’ is more relevant today than when it was first presented.”

Please avail yourself to this little yet hugely important piece written for the purpose to “re-mind” us that indeed, “your mind matters.” tnb