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It’s a glorious day to give thanks to God from whom all blessings flow! President Abraham Lincoln, in proclaiming the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father noted that, our “. . . Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.” The depth of that mercy is highlighted by the fact that Lincoln’s proclamation was written in the midst of a national struggle that makes our current skirmish in Iraq pale in comparison. To read Lincoln’s entire text, click here.

Our first lecture in the Culinary Culture series was by Tim O’Brian, founder and cultivator of the St. John’s Organic Parish Garden who spoke on “Culinary Culture and Christian Stewardship”.  The video of his excellent presentation is now available for your on-line viewing pleasure here.

Author and historian Darryl Hart will speak at 7:30 pm tonight at the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. The title of his talk is “The Last Dance: Why the Romance between the Religious Right and American Conservatism May be Over.” Dr. Hart’s most recently published book, A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation between Church and State (September 2006) provides the backdrop for Hart’s analysis of evangelicals’ rise to power during the last 25 years.

This weekend Dr. Hart will be speaking locally at a conference on Christianity and Culture sponsored by the Aletheia Forum. His talk at the conference will also draw from another of his recent books, Deconstructing Evangelicalism. Sharing the podium with Dr. Hart will be Signs of Life friend Caleb Stegall as well as World Magazine managing editor Timothy Lamer.

Bishop N.T. Wright is one of the most prolific Christian writers of our day. As a New Testament scholar and former Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey, Wright’s work has received a wide reading from a variety of Christians: mainline to fundamentalist, emergent to high-church Anglicans. Yet as wide as his readership is, even the quickest readers cannot seem to keep up with his pace of writing and publishing. As one pastor put it, “N.T. Wright writes faster than I can read!”

Nevertheless, Wright serves as one of the foremost defenders of orthodox Christianity today. We carry several of Wright’s most recent and most respected titles. Simply Christian has merited reviews from many prominent periodicals, and has been lauded as this generation’s Mere Christianity (the classic work by C.S. Lewis), serving to simply, yet faithfully present an introduction to the historic message of Christianity.

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For most modern Americans, the idea of rest or leisure sounds more like something to indulge in, or spoil themselves with, rather than a lifestyle. Take a look at the ads in any magazine or newspaper promoting various spa and health products, vacations, or other products meant for relaxation and you will find a reoccurring theme: “Take a break, you deserve it,” or “Indulge yourself with this special treat today, you’ve earned the break,” or “Escape with us on this cruise, leave the pager behind.” Rest and recreation is seen as an escape from reality—it is something we earn in two-weeks-a-year units. Our rest is defined by our work, not the other way around. Productivity is the highest goal, not leisure, not rest.

But as James Schall argues in his recent book, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, this modern approach to life is a grave departure from the Classical and Christian views of work, leisure, and rest. In Unseriousness, regarded as worthy successor to Josef Pieper’s classic work, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Schall describes leisure not as the escape from the dreary reality of our work demands, but as the natural extension of work which is the context for the highest duties of man. True leisure is the time for contemplating the highest things and participating in the grand activity of play in a way that expresses that which is truest about both our nature and God’s nature.

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What are your favorite novels and movies? If you had to limit your picks to 5 of each, which would you choose? World Magazine asked this of several of their senior staff plus Christian leaders around the country. We find in the resulting lists lots of books that we love, and lots of books that we’ve grown to love since being motivated by the lists to read them. Here are three examples.

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, appears on several peoples’ lists. This is the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning story of an old rural Iowa pastor writing for his young son his “begats”, or the story of his forebears. There’s so much we’d like our children to know, so much that we must tell them, even though we fear that many lessons are only learned by experience and not from second-hand parental wisdom. Robinson tells those stories with skill and tenderness.

We weren’t familiar with the works of Walker Percy, but his Thanatos Syndrome made it onto several lists. Since then we’ve enjoyed his Second Coming, a delightfully crafted story that follows the path of a young woman moving from schizophrenia to sanity; and a rich and powerful middle-aged man who is going insane. Their paths cross somewhere in the middle as she helps him find love and God.

Cormac McCarthy is admired by several of the people surveyed, so we decided to give him a try. All the Pretty Horses is a coming of age story about 16-year-old cowboy John Grady Cole who leaves his post-WWII Texas home to discover life breaking wild horses on a hacienda in Mexico. McCarthy won the National Book Award for his exuberant if Faulknerian prose and for the stark dignity of his characters.

It’s a fascinating list, and we’ve only scratched the surface of the books. Under the film favorites you’ll find hilareous juxtapositions such as one person who loves both The Princess Bride and Hotel Rwanda, and another whose favorites include both Sense and Sensibility as well as Black Hawk Down.

We recently learned something interesting about one of our suppliers. Good News Publishers, who puts out the English Standard Version Bible under its Crossways imprint, is a not-for-profit corporation. They are currently promoting the ESV by offering a special edition of the paperback New Testament for just 50 cents each. That means for a buck, I can give one to each of my friends

We’ve got a ton of them on hand, so come in and check it out.

Swing by downtown Lawrence today for the first annual Fall Bazaar!  Signs of Life will be featuring “buy 3, get one free” cards, and some half-priced best sellers.

The local paper today features an AP feed about the Africa Bible Commentary, a unique one-volume commentary on the entire Bible written by African theologians and produced in Africa by Zondervan. Though created to help pastors, students, and lay leaders in Africa apply God’s Word to distinctively African concerns, we think it will have broad appeal here given American Christians’ interest in the African church and the problems of disease and famine plaguing that continent.

Are your wages paid with real coin or with counterfeit? Bill Kaufman puts it this way in his new book Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists:

[T]he most ennobling work we do is seldom remunerated in greenbacks. Bearing and raising a child, cultivating a garden, just being there for a sibling or friend to lean on: this “work” is compensated in a currency far more valuable than Uncle Sam’s paper. . . [This is] the work we do for “nothing.” (For everything, really.) . . . This is the work whose coin, whose only coin, is love.

In his review of Kaufman’s book for the Intercollegiate Review, our friend Caleb Stegall discusses the real divide in American society today. It is not between liberal and conservative, but between materialists who argue about the best way to amass “more” and those who recognize a transcendent power.